Candide

Candide mind map is Satire based Novella. Voltaire's best-known work is Candide, a satirical book published in 1759. Various tragedies in the mid-eighteenth-century impacted Voltaire's Candide, including the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the commencement of the horrible Seven Years' War in the German kingdoms, and the unjust death of English Admiral John Byng. This philosophical fable is frequently hailed as an archetypal Enlightenment literature, yet it is also a satirical attack on the Enlightenment's optimistic beliefs.

Voltaire criticizes Leibniz's premise of adequate reason, which states that nothing can be true without a cause for it to be true. The conviction that the actual world must be the best humanly possible is a result of this principle. A satirical and parodic precursor of Candide, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is one of Candide's closest literary relatives. This satire tells "a gullible ingenue", Gulliver, who (like Candide) travels to several "remote nations" and is hardened by the many misfortunes which befall him.

As evidenced by similarities between the two books, Voltaire drew upon Gulliver's Travels for inspiration while writing Candide. Other probable sources of inspiration for Candide are Télémaque (1699) by François Fénelon and Cosmopolite (1753) by Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. Candide's parody of the Bildungsroman is probably based on the Télémaque, which includes the prototypical parody of the tutor.