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Voltaire, a French philosopher, wrote Candide while living in Prussia and Switzerland in the late 1750s. During this time, Europe was flourishing with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Influential texts such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile addressed issues of religious toleration, human rights, and corporeal punishment. This movement marked a huge change in the way Europeans viewed the world, and reached out to the aristocracy and average folks, alike. In fact, this spirit of social reform went so far as to influence monarchs such as Catherine the Great of Russia and Louis XVI of France to rule as Enlightened Absolutists. Neither was extremely successful, but nonetheless the strides made by them and all followers of the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for many governments today, including our own political system and much of our Constitution. In the format of a satirical adventure novel rather than a weighty philosophical treatise, Candide reflects Voltaire's lifelong aversion to Christian regimes of power and the arrogance of nobility, while simultaneously criticizing certain aspects of the philosophical movement of the Enlightenment. It attacks the school of optimism that contends that ra