context of the (mainly) nationalist-secular Seven Years' War (French and Indian War in America, 1756-63), Candide reaches meaning not as reformist tract but as a secular critique of faith and its institutions and--significantly--of secular institutions and traditions of faith that support them. There are no heroes in Candide; its title character lacks that stature, though he is a clever and lucky enough survivor to arrive at a degree of thoughtfulness.
It is a commonplace that Candide represents a direct satire of the views of the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), whose systemic and inflexible articulations of optimism, hence absolute faith in divine providence, in the face of repeated and intolerable horrors of human experience, is personified in the figure of Candide's tutor Pangloss. Voltaire's "violent" attack on Leibniz's "notorious" (Hampshire 142) doctrine of optimism can from one point of view be characterized as an instance in which the present age, like each age preceding it, seems capable of showing its distinction and superiority to the one immediately preceding it. Candide can be read as a high-Enlightenment critique of Enlightenment's formative generation f ideas--or more exactly of the residue of late-Renaissance religiosity; Hampshire cites Leibniz's absorbing interest in "the remnants of Renaissance magic" (142) in that regard. But Voltaire (1694-1778) was central to a much larger, culture-spanning critical dynamic. Published in 1758 while Voltaire was in exile in Switzerland and while France was busy fighting with England over the ownership of North America, Candide was central to an ongoing project of social and historical criticism.
Nothing about Voltaire's cultural concerns, i.e., from his concerns as a careerist commentator, should detract from the thematic concerns of the literary content of Candide. Such themes may have been risky enough to take on in the divided culture of Europe. The fact that Leibniz is ...