Publisher's Synopsis
Voltaire actively rejected Leibnizian optimism after the natural disaster, convinced that if this were the best possible world, it would surely be better than it is. In both Candide and Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem about the Lisbon disaster"), Voltaire attacks this optimistic belief. He uses the Lisbon earthquake in both Candido and his Poème to argue this point, sarcastically describing the catastrophe as one of the most horrible disasters "in the best of all possible worlds." In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, unreliable rumors circulated across Europe, sometimes overestimating the severity of the event. Ira Wade, a leading expert on Voltaire and Candide, has analyzed which sources Voltaire might have been referring to upon learning of the event. Wade speculates that Voltaire's main source of information on the Lisbon earthquake was Ange Goudar's 1755 work Relation historique du Tremblement de Terre survenu à Lisbonne.
