Candide
SynopsisPlot
It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply "optimism") by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world.
Story
About this book
Candide is a French satire written by Voltaire and first published in 1759, during the intellectual period known as the Age of Enlightenment. The story follows a young man named Candide who grows up in a comfortable, sheltered estate where his tutor, Professor Pangloss, teaches him that this is the best of all possible worlds. That philosophy draws on the ideas of the German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued that an all-knowing creator would necessarily have chosen the optimal arrangement of things.
Candide's protected life ends abruptly, and from that point the narrative sends him through a long sequence of misfortunes across multiple continents. He encounters war, natural disaster, cruelty, and corruption. Each episode tests the optimistic doctrine Pangloss instilled in him, and the gap between the theory and the visible state of the world grows steadily wider. Voltaire uses the accumulation of disasters partly for comic effect and partly as a pointed philosophical argument.
The book was controversial at the time of publication and was banned in several places, including Geneva and Paris. At roughly 100 pages in most editions, it moves quickly and packs its arguments into a compact frame. Voltaire wrote it under a pseudonym and initially denied authorship.
