Candide

Voltaire, the philosopher of the French Enlightenment, published Candide, ou l'Optimisme in 1759. The novella has been translated very widely, and its English versions have appeared under a range of titles, among them Candidus: or, All for the Best and Candide: or, The Optimist.

The young Candide is brought up in a comfortable and enclosed paradise, where his tutor, Professor Pangloss, teaches him Leibnizian optimism. That life is broken off abruptly, and the rest of the book follows Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he travels the world and runs into one hardship after another.

Voltaire does not quite abandon the philosophy he is satirising so much as set it aside. What the book ends by recommending is something much more practical, an instruction to cultivate one's garden, in place of Pangloss's insistence that everything happens for the best in a world that could not have been better arranged. It is a short, fast and cruel book, and it has been read ever since as the sharpest thing Voltaire wrote.