Candide is the story of an innocent boy named Candide living in a senseless and cruel world. He is a naive young man living in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-Ten-Tronckh in Westphalia who gets caught kissing the Baron's daughter, Cunégonde, and is exiled from the castle. Candide goes on a series of unusual and often horrific adventures which take him around the world in a search for Cunégonde. Along with his teacher, Pangloss, he endures: disease, rapes, robberies, wrongful executions, and an earthquake. Pangloss struggles to find justification for the terrible things in the world, but his arguments are ridiculous. In the end, Candide and Pangloss both realize that their previous ideas on optimism are far from the truth which eventually leads them to wisdom. I believe that Candide is a result of Voltaire's reaction to optimism. He wrote this book to mock Enlightenment thinkers
I think Voltaire wrote Candide to mock all of the Enlightenment thinkers who believed in optimism. Throughout the entire novel, he attacks the idea that “all is for the best” and that money brings you happiness. He uses many examples to get his point across without doing it in a harsh way. Candide is considered a representative text of the Enlightenment period, although the novel actually satires a number of Enlightenment beliefs.
Throughout the entire story, Voltaire attacks the claim that "all is for the best" (Voltaire 20). He uses comical allusions to this theme to contrast with the awful things that occur throughout the novel. For example, when Candide reunites with the Pangloss, who is dying from syphilis, he asks if the Devil is at fault. Pangloss says that syphilis is necessary in the best of worlds because the line of infection leads back to a man who traveled to the N
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