Candide A Classic Satire of Optimism, Folly, and Enlightenment Thought

Voltaire's Candide, translated by William F. Fleming, is one of the great satirical works of world literature: a swift, savage, and brilliantly comic attack on philosophical optimism, cruelty, hypocrisy, and human folly. Candide is raised to believe that all is for the best in "the best of all possible worlds," but his education in optimism collapses as he is driven through war, disaster, religious persecution, sexual exploitation, greed, slavery, and absurd social pretension. The result is a short novel of extraordinary speed and bite, at once hilarious, brutal, philosophical, and enduringly readable. First published in 1759, Candide, ou l'Optimisme remains Voltaire's most famous work and one of the defining texts of the Enlightenment. Its satire reaches across philosophy, religion, imperial violence, class vanity, romantic illusion, and metaphysical consolation, ending with one of literature's most famous calls to practical labour and private responsibility. Readers of classic fiction, French literature, Enlightenment philosophy, philosophical fiction, political satire, literary comedy, and eighteenth-century European thought will find in Candide a compact masterpiece whose clarity and force have not diminished with time.