Candide

Raised in a German baron's castle and tutored by the philosopher Pangloss — who insists that this is "the best of all possible worlds" — the naïve young Candide is expelled into reality the moment he kisses the baron's daughter, Cunégonde. What follows is a whirlwind, deliberately absurd tour of eighteenth-century catastrophe: war and massacre, the Lisbon earthquake, the Inquisition, shipwreck, slavery, and betrayal, across Europe, South America, and the fabled land of Eldorado.

At every turn Candide clings to Pangloss's optimism even as the evidence for it collapses, and Voltaire wrings dark comedy from the gap between rosy philosophy and a brutal world. The tale skewers religious hypocrisy, aristocratic vanity, colonial greed, and the intellectual complacency of thinkers who explain away suffering.

One of the most influential satires ever written, Candide, ou l'Optimisme ends on its famous, hard-won conclusion — that we must cultivate our garden — a quietly radical answer to grand metaphysical optimism.