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Candide cover
LAUGH & RESIST

Candide

by Voltaire

Everything keeps going wrong. His tutor says it's for the best.

For you if

you want to understand where the tradition of using comedy to dismantle power actually starts — and find out it starts with a massacre

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

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Voltaire sent his naive hero Candide through war, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery, and massacre — and gave him a tutor who keeps insisting, through all of it, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 and banned immediately by the Geneva city council, the book is a direct attack on the philosophical position that suffering is part of a divine plan and therefore acceptable. The form is the weapon: Voltaire adopts the cheerful optimism he is destroying and follows it to its logical conclusion until it collapses under the weight of the bodies. The foundational text of political satire in prose fiction — the ancestor of everything from A Modest Proposal to Cat's Cradle to Look Who's Back on this shelf. Everything that came after it in the satirical tradition owes it a debt.

Where This Book Lives

Themes
philosophical optimismpolitical satire
Topics
lisbon earthquake of 1755the inquisition

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