Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), the most celebrated writer of the French Enlightenment. A poet, dramatist, historian and polemicist, he was imprisoned in the Bastille and spent years in exile in England, Prussia and on the Swiss border, where he settled at Ferney. He campaigned against religious intolerance and judicial cruelty, notably in the Calas affair, and his philosophical tales, of which Candide is the most famous, made satire an instrument of argument.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
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