Voltaire's Satire & Critique

Voltaire’s satire and criticism include philosophical tales, poems, and short prose works that question accepted arguments and institutions. Candide sets a young traveller’s experience against an insistently optimistic philosophy, while Zadig and Micromégas use different imagined settings to unsettle human certainty. Rapid changes of circumstance and a concise narrative voice give the tales much of their force. Their targets include persecution, arbitrary power, and reasoning that overlooks suffering. Voltaire’s literary method joins philosophical argument to comic or disturbing incidents, making the relation between an explanation and the life it purports to explain a recurring concern.