Candide, the Lisbon Earthquake and the Problem of Optimism

On 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, an earthquake, tsunami and fires devastated Lisbon, killing tens of thousands of people. The disaster shook a popular philosophical optimism associated with Gottfried Leibniz and Alexander Pope, which held that this is the best of all possible worlds and that apparent evils serve a larger good. Voltaire responded with a Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756), asking how anyone could call such suffering part of a good plan.

Rousseau replied that human choices, such as crowding into tall cities, worsened the harm. In 1759 Voltaire published Candide, a short comic novel in which a naive young man and his tutor Pangloss suffer war, disaster and cruelty while insisting all is for the best. Its closing advice, 'we must cultivate our garden', suggests practical work rather than grand theories. Candide remains one of the sharpest Enlightenment critiques of complacency.