Candide, or Optimism, was written by François Marie Arouet Voltaire during the French Enlightenment. In this period, intellectuals in France known as the philosophes sought to apply reason to the laws of nature. Candide follows the travels of a young German who has been expelled from his comfortable existence in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh for a romantic encounter he had with the Baron's pleasing daughter. Although he might not have been a pessimist himself, Voltaire presents in Candide a pessimistic response to the optimism of the earlier part of the 18th Century.
             Voltaire uses Candide's story as an opportunity to satirize the optimistic philosophy present in the origins of the Enlightenment. Philosophical thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope had proposed that everything in the world is good, and that all events are for a reason, part of God's divine plan.
             Candide is part of a philosophical backlash that prevailed in the latter part of the century to this optimism of the earlier 18th Century. Voltaire lived in a period of deep pessimism in France. So says Voltaire in 1744,People are always crying that this world is in the process of degeneration.? Although a part of the philosophical movement of his day, Voltaire did not dispel all hope for the human race. Man,? as he said,also possessed for his species a natural benevolence which one never sees in beasts.?
             Voltaire, however, questioned the earlier optimism, and went as far as to question the existence and perfection of a God in a seemingly imperfect world. Furthermore, he points out corruption and hypocrisy in the church of this God. He finally points out the useless of Philosophy altogether. Candide listens to the philosophy of his friends throughout the story, but eventually finds happiness in the simple, thoughtless life of a gardener.
             Doctor Pangloss, Candide's close friend and tutor, is representative of the opti...