In Our Time - Voltaire's Candide

Episode Date: May 3, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Voltaire's novel Candide. First published in 1759, the novel follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, and his mentor, the philosopher Pangloss. Candide was written in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Lisbon and the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, events which caused such human suffering that they shook many people's faith in a benevolent God. Voltaire's masterpiece piles ridicule on Optimism, the fashionable philosophical belief that such disasters are part of God's plan for humanity - that 'all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds'.Often uproariously funny, the novel is a biting satire whose other targets include bad literature, extremist religion and the vanity of kings and politicians. It captivated contemporary readers and has proved one of French literature's most enduring classics.With:David WoottonAnniversary Professor of History at the University of YorkNicholas CronkProfessor of French Literature and Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of OxfordCaroline WarmanLecturer in French and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the French Enlightenment think of Voltaire was one of the most prolific writers of the 18th century. His output, which includes historical, scientific and political tracts, 50 plays and more than 20,000 letters is so vast that a new scholarly edition of his complete works runs to more than 100 volumes, and has taken half a century to compile. But much of Voltaire's fame rests on the success of one of his shortest works. The satirical novella Condide was published in 1759 when the author was 65.

It was immediately banned and immediately became a bestseller. Voltaire's masterpiece tells the adventures of an innocent young man, Condide, as he travels the world accompanied by the philosophy of Pangloss, a philosopher who constantly repeats his conviction that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. attacking religion, philosophers, literature, the army and human behaviour generally, it's a breathless breakneck satire. We're meant to discuss Voltaire's Condide are David Wooden, Professor of History at the University of York,

Nicholas Cronk, Professor of French Literature of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford, and Caroline Warman, lecturer in French and fellow Jesus College at the University of Oxford. David Wharton, it was first published Corned in 1759 at the height of the French Enlightenment. Could you give us some sense of the context, please? Well, there are several contexts to think about. The first is that this is during the seven years war, which begins in 1756, and the war has been started by Frederick the Great. Volta has spent several years in Berlin with Frederick.

They've probably been lovers. He's been thrown out by Frederick. He's been homeless for a period of time. And now he faces a Europe which is being torn apart by war, and war is the background for the novel. Secondly, it's the crisis. The war is all over the place, isn't it? War is all over the place.

And it involves all the European. Fighting in Canada, fighting in... And basically it's the fight between the English and the French for whose can grab the biggest empire. That's right. And Voltaire says the globe has become a globule. It's the first moment of globalization and the sense that the world has shrunk and what happens in one place affects what happens everywhere else.

Secondly, this is the moment of crisis of the French Enlightenment. January of 1757, Damien has tried to assassinate the King of France. Repression begins. The Enlightenment splits Russo breaks with the rest of the Enlightenment, and it's at that moment of... of crisis that Voltaire sits down to right candide. He feels that the political air of France is changing. He himself has been driven out of France and believes he will never be allowed to return.

And the question is, is there any hope for political progress in a country like France as reaction sets in? And he has not been driven out. He's been put in the Bastille for 11 months and driven out in a sense of properly exiled and pursued and persecuted for his writing. So can you give us some idea, David Wooden, not only of his astonishing range, but what got them about what he was doing. Well, Volta, everything that Volta does, he is an enormous success at.

He starts off by writing a tragedy. Edipus, it's the most successful tragedy of the day. He then writes an epic poem, the Ariad. Even the French don't put people in prison because they're successful. Well, they might. He's naughty. He's always naughty. He's always writing satirical stuff.

He's always falling out with people. He ends up driven into exile in England because he wants to engage in a duel with a dukech. Duke de Roja and he's regarded as a public menace. He wants to engage in a duel with the Duke de Rohing because Rojas had his servants beat Voltaire up and Voltaire thinks that he ought to be treated as an equal. Wanting to be treated as an equal is a great mistake

in the France of the 1720s and 30s and Voltaire has committed to that idea and the result is that he's always in conflict with authority. The business of the ranger, can we dwell on that for one or two, another couple of sentences of David? I mean, I said it's taking 25 years, to get these 100 volumes.

It is quite a lot. He's still known in France mostly as the great writer of classic drama, isn't it? Yes, and he's also a great historian. And he's also a great historian. And he's writing a universal history. Which is one of the most important texts of the Enlightenment. He writes with...

Most of the time, he's ill. Most of the time he's saying, I'm too ill to write, I'm suffering and so on. And yet he's churning out endless volumes and many of them based upon an extraordinary range of reading. He is a phenomenon. We know about his open affair with his mistress while her husband was in Paris.

You know about his far with his niece. You casually threw aside the fact that he had an affair with Frederick the Great. Is there evidence for that? There are love poems and love letters. But love poems isn't evidence for an affair, is it really? Volta actually describes Frederick's sexual practices, which probably don't go as far as what we would call intercourse. But they certainly involve intimate relationships with other men

and probably with Voltaire. So we're getting a bit of an idea of this rather, well, terrific character. And Nicholas Cronk, he was born in 1694. Can you tell us something about his early life? Yeah, so 1694, we're still the reign of Louis Catoz, the Sun King, still the grandeur of the 17th century. And Voltaire is very proud later saying, I was born in the reign of the Sun King,

which makes him a bit different from the next generation of Philosoph, like Dieter. He comes really to intellectual, some maturity under the Regency. So Louis XIV, he died in 174. 15 when Voltaire's in his teens. So the regency, which is the Duke of Olion from 7515 until 1723, is a period where there's a relaxation of more rays, a more anglophon. Because the grandson was the... The grandson was only five, and so he will become Louis the 15th.

So during that interregnum, France actually has quite... It's intellectually quite interesting. The regent opens up a more anglophile foreign policy. There's a slightly free intellectual spirit. and that is the period in which, as David was saying, Voltae becomes naughty, he becomes a satirical poet, gets put in prison. So he's very much a creature really of the Regency. But when we talk about Nazar Life, Davy's already pointed out,

his prolific learning and his great spirit. We must know more about his education. His father was a bourgeois, rather a grand bourgeois lawyer. And when Volta was about seven, his father must have got a promotion, and they moved to the Cour de Con. They moved on to the Idla Cé la Côte. Cite, which is still today in Paris, by the Notre Dame, where the great Pellé de Justice is.

So he grew up with his father, a really major legal figure. And he got a very good education. He was sent to Louis Le Grand, which is a great Jesuit college, perhaps the best school in France. Which is a boarding school? It would have been a boarding school. And it's still a great leis. Now, of course, a state leis in Paris. And he would have been taught a traditional humanist Jesuit curriculum by quite liberally minded Jesuits.

We know some of his teachers were great intellectuals, Porre, and so on. And he would have had fantastic Latin. He had some Greek, lots of theatre. As a schoolboy, he was so prolific. He translated a speech of one of his teachers, Le Perleges, into Latin, and the teacher thought this was so good

that he had it published. So there's actually an adolescent publication in the Bufat National signed by Arouet, Francois Arrawe. That's wonderful, by the way, because he never again publishes under that name. So he's a brilliant Latinist from being a schoolboy. So it brought up in a very classical way.

And did he himself say he'd been abused at this Jesuit school? I've read it in the notes of... Yes, he does. He claims... Is it a claim? Do you think it's justified? Oh, probably. Because, as always with Voltaire, he's always rather aware of his audience.

So the best evidence for telling this story is that he was invited, when in England, some years later, he's invited, of course, the English home of an English poet, and he tells the man's mother that as a boy he was buggered by the Jesuits. Well, of course, you don't quite know to what extent it's true, to what extent it was designed for the audience. But it caused much shock in a slightly puritanical England. So we have this. Did he go to university? I mean, I'm really, I'm just to dig in this education.

He was an extraordinary line. Of course, in the 18th century, going to Louis Le Gros was almost like going to university, because you went into your teens. And from Louis Le Gras, his father destined him for the law. So he began to train as a lawyer, at which I think he had the intellect, but no inclination. He had a very bad relationship with his father. His mother died when he was about seven. He has an elder brother called Armour, who was a fanatical Jansenist.

The Jansenists are sort of Calvinist, Catholic, so he doesn't get on with the elder brother. He has an adored elder sister who effectively brings him up after his mother's death. So his strong emotional link as a boy is really with his elder sister. And it's no coincidence that later on he adores that sister's two daughters, his two nieces, one of whom becomes his mistress. And he also is very fond of the other niece. So his best emotional relationship is with the children of the woman who was effectively his substitute mother.

But he doesn't become a lawyer. How does he set up shop so early to be so significant? How do you make a living start from anything else? Well, there was enough family money. The family was wealthy, though there was family money. He moved in some interesting circles He was a brilliant networker from a very early age He moved first of all

With a rather libertine circle Around something called the Abbe de Cholia Who had a sort of gathering of people that saw And so there were various intellectual circles Where in fact he moves with poets And he begins publishing poetry very early on Are you suggesting when you're Are you implying a rather loose set?

Well he moves in different circles the Shulia wasn't lusch but it was libertine in the sense that it was free thinking. But he also moves at Sore with the more aristocratic circle who were in opposition to the regent. Volta is always incautious. He never knows really, he takes lots of risks, he does daft things. He seems to write quite a funny poem against the regent, a satirical poem, which is one of the reasons he gets locked up. He can't resist, I think, writing satire, while at the same time writing this,

play that David was referring to Adip. Edipus. And by the way, for a man who doesn't get on with his father to make your first tragedy, Oedipus is quite telling. So we're talking about somebody who is brilliant and famous from the start and recognises such by most of his contemporaries and his elders and no betters, as it were. Absolutely. And then I think what's so interesting at that point is that in 1718, when he's only in his

mid-20s, he drops his father's name. And that's very significant, I think. So in 1718 we have a letter Written to an Englishman, Lord Ashpenham, where he signs Arouet de Voltaire. So he drops his father's name, Arouet, and becomes, from the moment of the first success of Eidip, Oetipus, he becomes Voltaire.

So he never is the person he says he invents a name right from the start and becomes famous with an invented name. He likes invented names. He has lots of them on the way through, isn't it? Hundreds and hundreds. Caroline Warman, can we develop his his views, tell, the listeners more about his views as a

polemicist, but let's stay in the 1750s. He didn't write this until he was 65, indeed, so he has, we have a lot of territory to get through before we hit the subject. What causes particularly inflamed him? Okay, so you say stay in the 1750s, but I feel I need to pedal back to the 1730s. The stage is yours.

Thank you very much. When he wrote the philosophical letters, concerning an English nation. So it's going to England that turns him into a comparativist and a polemicist saying, what? Exiled in England, wasn't he? He was not exiled. It was a good idea for him not to be in Paris after the beating that David mentioned with

the Chevalier de Orange, Chabot. So I don't think he had to go. And he pointed out, I didn't have to go. I chose to go. I've chosen to go and visit my English friends and develop English and the rest of it. And it was, so in writing those letters concerning an English nation, in French, Let Philosophique, that he started talking about Locke, as opposed to Descartes.

He started trying to say, Newton is somebody we ought to know about in France. We ought to consider bringing in inoculation. All sorts of causes start being developed then. We should be interested in commerce and not hierarchy. We should treat our writers, and our intellectuals particularly well, said Voltaire. And so that's been good.

Going for so two decades and a half by the time he gets to Cahdide, but in the 50s, perhaps what he's still trying to do is to be the best friend of Kings. He's trying to be the best friend of Frederick the Great World, best friend we've already gone into that. But, you know, the advisor of Kings, perhaps we could, you know, he thought maybe he could whisper some sensible ideas into the ears of Kings, a bit like, you know, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and exactly as with Aristotle and Alexander the Great,

the militarism was not halted. So he's still, he's quarrelling a lot all that time, but perhaps he's not campaigning. And I think it's the 1760s when he starts picking up campaigns and he campaigns to get the name of Kallas cleared. I mentioned John Kallas, a Protestant who was wrongly accused of killing his own son and was revoltingly executed. on the wheel and Voltaire picks that up almost immediately in the wake of writing Condide

and campaigns right across Europe with letters and gets everybody involved and does clear his name and Deidre at the end says if there were a Christ then Voltaire would certainly be going to heaven and that's why ultimately goes to the Pantheon he's put you know consecrated as a great French man we have to explain he was in England for three years he sort of fell in love with it. Newton became his great man. When Newt was married in Westminster Rabby, he wrote, this is the way that emperors have treated everywhere else, but in England they do it

to an intellectual. And he met Jonathan Swift, and maybe Galliver's travels had a bit of an impact on. It was a big thing. He was given a pension by George II. And he took it. And so on. So did the English experience, this is being

Germanistic small, you can say no, we can move on. Did you think it had a key effect on the way he thought? Yes, I do, but I also think he used it in certain ways. So he said, I write and think like an Englishman, which went down very well with the English, but he might have been saying it in order to make the English love him, and perhaps he was representing England in a certain way to France

in order to gain certain ends. And what was, we can come to the writing of Corneddeed now, and what was going on in his life, then he, one thing we haven't mentioned, you've managed to cram an awful audience, the three of people, but one thing is that he became incredibly rich by backing the lottery with a palafirs who was a statistician.

Yes. That's not bad, is it? That's very clever. So already in the, that was in the 1720s, so no wonder in the Lefiosophique, he's writing about how wonderful the stock exchange is and how it brings great happiness to everybody, because if everybody's wealthy,

everybody will be happy. What's he doing in the 1750s? So 1749, Madame de Chatelle, this great mathematician, with whom he's had a long liaison, she dies. And Fredericks goes, okay, well, he's no longer attached to the apron strings of Madame Duchatley. I'm going to get him to Berlin. So off he goes to Berlin and is there for three years. And it ends badly, I mean really badly.

And he leaves and is sort of interfered with as he leaves. And Madame Deney is locked up. And that's horrible. and he's at this point therefore sort of stateless and courtless he's not welcome at the court of Louis XIV, 15th he's not welcome at the court

of Frederick the great he doesn't really know where to go Madame de Chathlet isn't there he's wealthy what is he going to do so he goes to Geneva thinks that's a great sort of free thinking place

and and buys a great big house Le Delis which you can still go and visit. And in 1755 there's the Lisbon earthquake, which shakes everything that he's been thinking about. I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about.

We're going to talk about in a minute. I think we've got where we are. And I want to move on to the writing of Condede now. I don't think we've missed much of significance out about his life, although it has been an accelerated passage to 1765. It's quite a show. I was called a novella even, David Wooden. It's a short novel, 80-odd pages, that's it.

And it's plots relatively straightforward. So can you summarise it for us? It's very short. It's 15,000 words. You could read it in a couple of hours or loud. It's tiny. Everyone prints it in big print to make it into 80 pages. I was fooled.

And it goes at the most extraordinary pace. 30 chapters, average of 500 words a chapter. First 10 chapters are set in Europe. Candide, young man, living in a country. castle, happy as could be, discover sex, is kicked out of the castle, is taken up into an army, is beaten up, fights in battles, escapes, goes to Amsterdam, sets out to sea, is caught up in a storm, the man who's rescued him, drowns, ends up in Lisbon, where the earthquake takes place, he's put on trial by the Inquisition for having the wrong opinions, and he escapes

to the new world. That's the first ten chapters. Then we have ten chapters. Then we have ten chapters. in the new world. He escapes from the police forces that are after him. He visits the Jesuit communist kingdom of Paraguay. He enters the wonderful utopia of El Dorado. He leaves with vast quantities of wealth, which he wants to take back to make himself important and famous in the old world. All his wealth is stolen from him. Then we haven't, that's the middle section. Then the third section, he returns to Europe. He goes to Paris where everything is nasty and corrupt. He goes to Venice, which is full of kings who've been dethroned, Voltaire's writing as a Republican,

and eventually he escapes to Constantinople, where he establishes a little farm on the shores of the Bosphorus and discovers happiness. And the two characters are, he's always in pursuit of this beautiful woman, Cunegonde, for whom, the fondling of whom for which he has been kicked out of the castle in the first place. Exactly, he's totally in love with her.

And he's haunted by his old teacher Pangloss, who is. This is the best, what's the best, What's the full frame? The best of all possible worlds. Yes. So these two are around. He was pursuing one and haunted by the other. That's correct. And all through we have these pairs. There's Kuhnagant who has a serving maid who's called the old woman who has lived a life of disaster and catastrophe and lost a buttock. Well, she lost it in unusual. So she was sliced off in order to feed the army when they were short of the... Oh, never mind.

So it was a very fair thing. It was a very fair thing. Rather than resort to cannibalism, they simply slice pieces off the women in the party and eat them, and this saves their lives. She's lucky to have only lost about it. And that's the tone of candide... The savagery, the ranting, the racism,

I mean, it is a... It's like being in the ring with Mohammed Ali when he's in a temper, isn't it? An endless chain of disasters, and wherever you think you're escaping from disaster, a new disaster is waiting for you, until the very end, when the disasters momentarily, at least, come to a halt.

The full title of the novel in English, Nicholas Crunk, is Condide or Optimism. Now, what's the significance of that word optimism in the original title? Right. Well, the first thing to say is that it's not optimism in quite the modern sense, obviously. It refers to a philosophical system, and I think that people sometimes forget is it's a new word in French. It only comes into the French language in the late 1730s. So the word had been around for less than about 20 years, and it really described a philosophical system. So a reader in 759 would have laughed at the title because it was deliberately a bit of jargon. And that's, of course, a modern reader can't respond in the same way because the word has become normalized to us.

So it refers to a philosophical system of lightnits. And I'll give a sort of simplified version. Lightnits, well, to understand the answer, one needs to think about the question. So the question is really, why does evil exist? So that's a very, very old question that applies to all cultures. I need, and Ross. We all like to know why evil exists. and there are lots of answers.

So in polytheistic cultures, it was easy. You had good gods and bad gods, and when something bad happened, you blame the bad gods. That was easy. For the monotheistic cultures, it was always much more difficult because if there's only one god,

he's normally good and perfect, so why does the good, single God allow evil to exist? So from the beginning of Christianity and Judaism and Islam, there are problems about why is there evil. And there are many, many answers. The book of Job is one of my own.

one answer in the Old Testament. In the Enlightenment, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, Leibniz tries to come up with a rational answer, which is a bit surprising. He just says, well, actually, it's almost a slight of hand. He says, actually, evil doesn't exist. The world is the best that it could be imagined. The fact that you as an individual man think that there is evil just means you don't have the divine plan. But according to Lightnitz, there is a rational shape. There is order to the universe. And I would stress that word order, because when we come back to talking about Condit, as David just said. It's all about disorder. The whole narrative structure

of Condeed embodies lack of order. And the narrative structure is an attack on Lightenance, let alone what they actually say about him. So Leibniz thinks that there is order in the universe, and it's simply that man doesn't understand order when he sees it. So if a dog savage is a child, that's

not as bad as it seems, because if it hadn't savaged that child, it could have savaged 20 children and so on. It's not been put down after savaging the one child. Exactly. We think it's a sad event. What we don't realize is it's part of a divine structure, which is actually the best of possible worlds. Which comes head on to the Lisbon earthquake, which is a big, well, there's not many big things in this shorter book than I thought it was. But it is a central thing. It was a shook Europe, both shook Europe as an event,

because it's a great earthquake, and a city, it seemed to have destroyed a city, and that tsunami which followed it. But also, why did God let that happen? It was exactly what Nicholas was talking about. Can you just describe how this Elizabeth earthquake, as it were, fed into the philosophical disputes at the time, especially with Voltaire? Okay, I think this is where we have to talk about deism. So Voltaire had been broadly optimistic, perhaps in the specific sense that Nicholas is mentioning, and in the sense that we now think he thought there might be progress, and he thought also there was a god and that probably there was an ordered universe, and perhaps we could learn about it,

and that's why we have to all, you know, write long books about Newton and explain to everybody what Newton is all about. Which is what he did? Which is what he did, yes. And when the Lisbon earthquake happened, the idea is that Voltaire stood back and said, this car, okay, so it's not ordered. There is no reason for this.

It's capricious. It's ridiculous. There may be a god, but maybe he's not even interested. Maybe there is no order whatsoever, and it's a disaster. So it's evil. Even nature is evil. in the way that it works. David Wooden, what other,

if you wanted to develop out, please do, but what other ideas is he bringing in? He's bringing out in Greek ideas, is bringing quite a lot to bear, isn't he? Yes. I mean, he didn't write an encyclopedia without knowing a lot. He brings in things from all over the place all the time.

And in a way, what's behind Candide is another encyclopedia, Pierre Bell's philosophical and critical dictionary, which has come out in 1697, which is what's inspired Leibniz to write his defense of, God's universe and to say this is the best of all possible worlds. What Bail had said is there's too much evil in the world. There's so much evil in the world that our experience of life is predominantly experience of evil.

Whenever we have pains, if you have toothache, the toothache is much worse than any pleasure you ever get. If you look back over your life, you spend more time unhappy and miserable than you you spend happy. Nobody, Bail says, if they were asked to live their life again, would volunteer to do so. The Bale says, this is a world dominated by evil. And he says, if you want to make sense of this, the only rational explanation is manichuism.

There's a good God and a bad God. They're fighting at things out, and the bad God has got control of our universe. And in Candide, Martin, appears the opposite to Bangloss. Blancos says this is the ideal and perfect world. Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong.

He's Leibniz, as it were, enacted. Martin says, this is an evil world. Evil always triumphs. And the test of the triumph of evil is the telling the story of one's own life. Everybody who tells a story of their life in Candide tells a story of disaster. And Voltaire wants to say, that's how we live our lives.

We live from disaster to disaster. So we've got that. Nicola, do you have come in anyway? I was just going to say another thing about the earthquake, which is that there have been other earth, there have been a very bad earthquake in Peru in the 17th century. There have been other great disasters. So there is a question about why does the Lisbon earthquake in 55

cause such an effect in Europe? And it's partly about the media. That's to say that in the 17th century, The news arrived from Peru. It took many, many years and no one really knew. By 1755, there are newspapers in Europe that spread news across Europe. So what had happened in Lisbon was known in London and Berlin within a few days or a week. And it was huge. The horrors of the earthquake, first of all, the numbers of killed were vastly increased. In fact, we think 15,000 or 20,000 people died.

Newspapers at the time said 70,000. There was a sort of tabloid press effect. newspapers in Paris and London had fold out engravings of the horrors of the ruins and so on. It becomes a sort of media event which had never happened before with a disaster. So it's an effect of the new style of the press really.

And of course Condit itself also is a media event so that Volta himself uses the print mechanisms of Europe to get this book printed across Europe. So I think it's partly... Very cunningly printed in different places at the same time. So if they sense it in one country, it popped up in another. Just like Cordid. It kept popping up in different places.

you couldn't kill it. But this is interesting. The way that these great events are feeding straight into the book, aren't they? So we think of it, well, this is a philosophical, reflective novel, but it's almost like a hurried, dashed off piece. Can you talk to us about, is there any overarching thing that he's attacking beside the lightness idea of optimism?

He is, although he's been a dazed, he's very against established religion, isn't he, hierarchical or unidgen? How important is that? Okay, so I think the fact that he seems to be attacking optimism is sort of a red herring, it's a frame. What he really wants to attach attack is the abuses of power and hypocrisy. And so by setting it up to say everything is for the best

in the best of all possible worlds, and then having this nitwit hero running around going, oh, yes, this is very good. but he has all of these experiences which one after the other relate to actual abuses or actual events which ended up in an abuse of power and that allows Voltaire to attack them and show them to be irrational and disgraceful.

So that's really what he's... He does cover the treasured, doesn't it, David, wouldn't? You're going to say something, can I put another... Please, carry on him. It's a story about the abuse of power, the Inquisition, killing people, rulers, murdering and torturing people, the abusive parents everywhere.

But in a way, the lesson you appear to draw from Candid is there is nothing you can do about it. And the wonderful thing is if you can just escape from it. Voltaire's escaped to his house called Le Delis. He's living a life of pleasure and happiness and delight. And he knows that elsewhere, mayhem is breaking up. People are dying in earthquakes. The war is taking place and people are being slaughtered on the battlefield.

Massive casualties in that war, weren't they? Massive casualties. a million men under arms. And he's sitting here, and the worst thing that happens during the earthquake is a bottle of wine falls off his table and breaks. His life is perfect. And there's a sense of this free sort of guilt

that he's having the ideal life and he's successful and rich and he's had his troubles in the past but he's got away from them. And can he do anything about what everybody else is suffering from? The answer is no. He's tried to talk to Frederick.

And what's Frederick done? He's gone off and started a war. Shows the usefulness of that. And in that sense, the message of the book is as a world, a double message, and the whole book is doubled. It's despair about what you can do about the world, but also hope that you can escape from the causes of despair. Yes. And the way he picks off what's going on at the time is it's only a paragraph about slavery, but it's terrific, isn't it, the man with one arm and one leg. And he comes to England, sees the execution of Admiral Bing, decides that he's not going to be in a place like this, and goes back in his condede, of course. The paragraph about slavery is added at the last moment.

He's read Helvius, and Helvius has said that when we eat sugar in Europe, it's stained with the blood of slaves. And Voltaire eats sugar all the time. He loves sugar. He's shocked. There is one good man, and he's an Anabaptist. Jack, who rescues Sir Candid. And, of course, he dies early in the story. He dies almost immediately.

He's the only character virtually who dies and doesn't come back to life. The story is full of people who appear to die. Pangloss is killed off and then comes back. King Higgins brother Let's reassure everybody This is not resurrection No no It's general to do with people who can't hang people properly

Yes It's fictional resurrection These are plot devices And the plot device is constructed around The fact that the story keeps moving on But in a way it keeps turning back on itself So that you end up with exactly the same characters at the end as you've had at the beginning Except for Jacques

Who's the Anna Baptist who's the one good person And he's dead dead dead dead but let's move on to Nicholas Cronk, great claims have been made for Condi that it changed this, did it change, that, it changed the other. How influential was it? It's on other books and on people's minds. I think to begin with, the point we made earlier

just about the publishing success, that first of all was extraordinary. I mean, it appeared in the very first year, 7059, I think there were 17 editions across Europe. It's been estimated there were something like 20,000 copies sold in that first year, which by the standards of that time is extraordinary. So simply that intrusion on the marketplace

is an amazing commercial happening. It was very common in the 18th century to write follow-up. When a novel was successful, you wrote a part two or a part three. Go to Japan. That's right. Exactly like we do be films nowadays. And so the year after Condéde

out came another novel called Condé Part 2. Everyone thought it by Voltaire. It also sold quite well. Voltaire said, I didn't write it. But then he'd said that about Condé the first time round, so no one believed him. And in fact, he didn't write Condi Part 2. and then someone wrote a Condi Part 3

and so it goes on. So Condit itself has a huge impact on contemporary French fiction because people meet... Only on books called Condé? Well, there's Condé's in Denmark and there are various variations on it. In London, there's a publisher called John Noos who publishes Condé in French right from early 759 and in the course of that first year

there are three different competing English translations. So it has an extraordinary impact on the market. What were the precedence? Had there been novels like this before Condé, Caroline Woman? Well, I suppose there were novels by Voltaire like this. I mean, this wasn't the first philosophical tale that he had written.

But what I sort of want to say, really, is that there had been Rabelais in the early 16th century, which is a massive anti-clerical satire with people knocking around the world, sort of ricocheting around the world from one event to the other. And as they go satirizing very, abuse is of power. So it's a sort of well-established model, but I don't know whether that's quite the same thing as Candide. I think Conded somehow manages to synthesize sort of fairy tales

along with high satire so that it's very readable and that they use the innocence and appealingness of the sort of false innocence of fairy tales and then inject all of the satire into it. So I don't So the answer is there was lots before Condi that was like Condid and in fact nothing at all. Yes. Rabelais is in a sense completely different in that it's a tidal wave of words. Well, Candide is so compressed. But I think the real model in a way

is when Melvin's already referred to, it's Caliphers travels. This is a voyage novel, which is Candid is. He met Swept in London. He met Swept. He read the book. He certainly liked the book. And he had this, I think, think this model of a voyage

story where you see different cultures and you see also the awfulness of humanity. There's actually a reference at one point when in the new world Condide and Carcambor get, they fall asleep and then when they wake up they've been tied up by the cannibals that's a clear wink to

Caliver's travels. Yes and then they persuade them, don't they? To behave like a question of human beings. Because they're Jesuits. Because he's dressed up in a Jesuit uniform and then Condid panic Cacombo the servant is much more rational and says to them if we can prove to you we're not Jesuits

you and they say no and so he proves rashly they're not Jesuits and they're saved. And the point of Cacombo's argument is eating a Jesuit would of course be fine because he wants to get the cannibals to understand his point of view. Eating a Jesuit would be fine

but we're not Jesuits so you shouldn't eat us and this becomes a great slogan that people go around chanting in the streets of Paris let's eat a Jesuit, let's eat a Jesuit. Monsieur de Jesuit becomes a proverb immediately in French. See, one thing that I've read in your notes I didn't know this before, that was newly around then in the European consciousness of people like Voltaire was the Arabian Knights, 1, Arabian Nights.

Are we talking about that feeding in as well? Yes, absolutely. It has this gileless prince, this true love, this quest for the perfect love, that sort of. Yes, yes. Yeah, so there's the Arabian Nights which has got its sort of magical, fantastical aspect. But there's also those fairy tales from the end of the 17th century. And they are also sort of thought to be completely wonderful. Marina Warner reads them as being a way for the people to digest the effects of power.

So the giants are, as it were, the great lords. And you can see how that actually fits really neatly into this particular model as well, where Voltaire is trying to sort of give us some wicked people who are unbelievably wicked. And, of course, it is all about power, so it sort of fits. There is an interlude, David Wooden, where he ends up in El Dorado. and people are lovely and everybody's rich and he picks up a few stones from the ground. The diamonds are big as big as a brick and that sort of thing.

And it's a wonderful place altogether and he gets bored stiff. He gets bored stiff. I mean, I didn't think Condi'd got bored. I don't think he's bored. Where does he leave then? Bordom is important. Valtas suffers endlessly from boredom.

And England, they don't have, the word boredom doesn't, the word tabor is just beginning to be used in the 1650s for the first time. The word boredom is a 19th century word. The word for this is ennui. It's a French disease, and Voltaire suffers from it. And there's a long passage in Venice where there's a man called Poco Curante,

No Troubles, who's rich and successful and suffers endlessly from boredom. And yes, I think when Candid goes to El Dorado, everything's wonderful, and he has freedom and wealth. And at the same time, what he's lacking is any opportunity to make something of himself. Voltaza and believes in people making something of themselves. He's a competitive individual.

But Condide, he doesn't give... You're shaking your head a lot here, Caroline. Will you please let us into the shakes? Okay. I think that the El Dorado is not presented as a place where Condide is actually bored. It's just that he wants to see Cunegonde. So he's got this little sort of fever

that propels him out of there. that actually he would rather, he knows he ought to stay. And the king says, you know, you can leave, but none of my subjects leave. They all make a vow never to leave because they know that it's wonderful. And why that seems to me to be important is that when Rousseau in 1761 writes the social contract, he sets up a perfect community and he says everybody should make a vow. They make a contract. It's the social contract.

you say, I will never leave because I accept that I'm going to give up my freedom and I'm going to have this. And I'm wondering whether Rousseau is really arguing with Voltaire and that this sort of particular utopia is something quite important. I think another way of looking at the Eldorado episode is to think of it as one more bit of fictional parody. So we've talked a lot about the philosophical and the political targets in Condédeed. The other way of looking at it is that it's a total, complete send-up of fiction. Voltaire hates the novel. It's the one genre.

really like. But he writes this great comic novel in which he makes fun of every single novel that have been written. There are lots of novels we don't really read now, 17th century invention novels, and what happens in them? There are shipwrecks, there are violence, there are pirates, there's El Dorado.

All these things are crammed in at breakneck speed into this novel. We've got to come to the last sentence in the novel, David Wooden, because we've come into the last paragraph in the programme, and that's all for a well, but we should cultivate our garden says. a contented condid who's lost everything as it seems, and yet he's found his cune agon,

his great love of his life is now an old, irritable woman who gives him a very bad time, but a few people around him and they get on with literally cultivating their garden. Now, how do you interpret that? It's a very complicated sentence. Cultivating involves work. It's a market garden.

They're going to grow their own crops, Walter himself plants, cabbages. They're going to get out there and work and escape from boredom by work. and they're going to work together. They cooperate. Instead of hierarchy, we have people engaged in a common enterprise. There's about six of them.

Yeah. It's a garden. It refers back to the Garden of Eden. It refers to Epicurus' Garden. The garden is where you can escape and form a little enclave away from the horrors of the world. Those are the two things, I think, work which makes man free. I've sentenced one can hardly say now, but there we go. I think it's almost there in Walter.

and at the same time there is the walled garden which is protected from the awful things that are going on outside. I agree with all that, of course, but the penultive paragraph, as someone says to Condéé, Traveillance, let's work and not reason, not think.

So the trouble is, on the one hand, of course Dave is right, they work together, they find relief from ghastliness in just getting on with life, but if the cost is you don't think, you don't reason, that can't be Voltaire's conclusion. Oh, but surely it is. Volta's conclusion is that philosophy is useless.

What's helpful is talking about your experience of life. Excuse me, there's alarm and horror on my left. Caroline, please. Voltaire pretends to be anti-philosophy, but the whole thing is a massive tract of Lockeanism, isn't it? It's about you experience things, the world writes on you, and you learn from it. Instead of being passive, you become active, and then you start working. So I see it as more active, as less reclusive, I think, than you're saying. And also I have to say a word for cunegonde. She's not such an old bag who gives him a hard time.

She makes him croissant. She becomes an amazing patisserie, you know, made. Before she was, she's always described as a sort of luscious, a pitticante, luscious. And so for being somebody you want to eat the flesh of her, then now she makes things that you want to eat. That's fine, isn't it? That's acceptable contribution on the part of Cunegonde. Nobody was questioning Cuneagonde. Okay, good.

I was just saying that he'd gone around the world expecting to see this beautiful young woman, and when he arrived, she was a toothless old lady. Yeah, but he's not, yes. I think I must have surprised him. And Conde does actually say at the beginning of the last chapter, he doesn't really want to marry him, but he feels obliged to it because he's decent. He does the decent thing. Very briefly, Nicholas, very, very, very briefly.

Why, what grounds did the authorities banning him so immediately? sheer cheekiness. It wasn't any particular thing. The whole tone is deeply subversive because he makes fun of everything. Right. Well, thank you very much. No, there is no more time. I'm awfully sorry. Thank you Nicholas Cronk. Thank you, Caroline Warman. Thank you again, David Wharton. And next week, we're going to talk about game theory. Thank you very much for listening.

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