Voltaire answered an earthquake with a comic novel that got banned
After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire could no longer stomach the claim that everything happens for the best. His reply was Candide, a breakneck satire in which a naive young man meets disaster after disaster. Banned for blasphemy on release, it is now counted as his masterpiece.
The target was a philosophy built on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theodicy, which held that a benevolent God had made the best world that could exist. In the novel that idea is preached by the tutor Pangloss to his pupil Candide, who grows up in a sheltered, paradise-like household. Once he is thrown out into the world, war, cruelty and catastrophe steadily strip away his faith in his teacher. The Seven Years' War and the Lisbon disaster, with its tsunami and fires on All Saints' Day, both surface repeatedly in the story.
Voltaire mocked nearly everyone: clerics, governments, armies and philosophers alike. The tone is dry and bitter, the plot wild and fast, and adventure clichés are sent up in a form that parodies the coming-of-age novel. Swift's Gulliver's Travels, another tale of a credulous traveller hardened by misfortune, was probably a model, as was Fénelon's Télémaque, whose comic tutor may lie behind Pangloss.
A popular legend says Voltaire dashed the book off in three days. Scholars instead think he started it around 1757 and wrote most of it in late 1758, partly at his home Les Délices near Geneva and partly during a three-week stay with the Elector Palatine at Schwetzingen. The only surviving pre-publication manuscript lay unnoticed in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal for nearly two centuries until Ira Wade identified it in 1956.
Publication in early 1759 was among the most secretive of its century, with editions appearing at once in five countries; seventeen French versions from that year survive, and which came first is still debated. The ending offers no grand system in reply to Pangloss, only a modest instruction to tend one's own garden. Martin Seymour-Smith later placed Candide among the 100 most influential books ever written.
Source: Candide
