It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this 'optimism' concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the 'all for the best' approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters - such as the recent earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon - not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging...

The spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period, and the crowning achievement of that caustic, brilliantly learned age was Voltaire's Candide, published in 1759, at the height of its author's enormous European fame. Following the worldwide encounters - with shipwrecks, earthquakes, pestilence, and human insanity - of its hero and his incomparably absurd tutor, Dr. Pangloss, Candide is the most entertaining of all philosophical...