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CE 1694 Voltaire is born in Paris, France to a wealthy lawyer and the daughter of a member of Parliament; his given name is François-Marie Arouet.
1717-8 Arouet is imprisoned in the Bastille prison in Paris, falsely accused of writing a satiric attack on the king. On his release, he publicly adopts the name Voltaire.
1734-50 He lives in exile on the border of the French province of Lorraine, studying Newtonian physics and contemporary philosophy.
1759 Candide is published.
1778 Voltaire returns to Paris to see the performance of his latest play, Irene. He is received as a hero. He dies on May 30.

"Voltaire" was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, a French writer who spent much of his life outside of France, banished for his satires and attacks on the government and the royal family. His 1759 novel Candide tells the story of an endlessly optimistic young man who goes through the most terrible adventures, and witnesses those of his friends, only to wind up safe and contented, though in a strange land.

Just as Gabriel García Márquez presents a "magical realism" in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which events we would call unreal or impossible mix freely with what we would identify as real, so Voltaire presents a world made up of extremes of bitter realism and shocking fiction, and makes it hard to separate the two. Candide presents real events and lets fictional characters tell the truth about them. For example, when Candide goes to Lisbon and the city is destroyed by a terrible earthquake, some survivors are picked out by the Catholic church for burning. They are human sacrifices who will atone for the sin that must have caused the quake. A real church leader in Lisbon would not have openly said that "burning a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible preventive of earthquakes." He would have had a complex theological argument in favor of the burnings that never used the word "burning". But in Candide, the religious leader says this, bluntly and clearly, and in so doing, strips the action and the church of all justification. In Candide, it's as if every character has been given a truth serum which makes him or her tell all, honestly, without shame or fear.

In this way, Candide goes beyond satire to a philosophical examination of the human mind and our ability to deny reality. Why do we use lies to support injustice? Why do we turn a blind eye to hypocrisy? Why would we rather live in a world of criminal unfairness than a better world—for we all have chances to change things. Voltaire shows us that just like Candide, who cannot stay in the paradise of El Dorado because he is tied to a part of the fallen world, we all fail in our opportunities to make this world indeed the best possible one.

Candide was written in French, Voltaire's native language. It was translated into English the same year it was published in French, and titled Candide: or, All for the Best. An Italian translation also came out in 1759. In 1762 another English translation by the novelist Tobias Smollett appeared called Candide: or, The Optimist; Smollett was just the first of many writers to be influenced by the work. It has been translated into every major world language.