Candide

VOLTAIRE, pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French satirist, novelist, historian, poet, dramatist and polemicist. Voltaire was the universal genius of the Enlightenment. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for his satires in 1717-18, and exiled to England in 1726-29. His life was divided between long periods of retreat in the provinces (first in Champagne with Mme du Châtelet, finally at Ferney near Geneva) and brief returns to metropolitan centers (Paris, Versailles, Berlin). His literary principles were fundamentally neoclassical. His political principles were essentially liberal. The “Lettres philosophiques” (1734), inspired by his residence in England, attack the abuses of the ancien régime in the name of tolerance and liberty.
In “Candide, ou l´optimisme”, his cleverness and precision, his dazzling mockery of the cruelty and obscurantism of the civil and ecclesiastical establishments was the source of his immense success.