Candide

A short, fast, extremely violent prose satire in which a naive young man is thrown out of his castle and dragged across the world — earthquake, war, inquisition, slavery, shipwreck — while his tutor keeps insisting this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire wrote it in 1759, partly against Leibniz’s optimism and partly against the reflex that explains away catastrophe, and it was condemned and banned in Paris and Geneva within months.

The ending is the whole argument: after every system of consolation has failed, the survivors plant a garden. It is on a formation list as the Enlightenment turning its instruments on its own complacency.

Context: Grouped under Drama by the list despite being a novella; the only French Enlightenment entry in that grouping.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Voltaire — the author.
• Enlightenment — the movement Candide belongs to and argues with.