Introduction

Salman Rushdie opens the series with the book that made him good at French: the copy of Voltaire's Candide he has kept since a boarding-school teacher called Pig Lewis put it in his hands at 16. He lays out the ground. Voltaire's target is the Catholic Church, and the Inquisition in particular; his method is speed. The story runs like a speeded-up film, and tragedy at that pace starts to look like slapstick, which Rushdie says is deliberate.

The turn is Leibniz. Rushdie names the real philosopher behind Pangloss, the man who invented the calculus and believed we live in the best of all possible worlds, and shows how Voltaire tests that phrase against the Seven Years' War: perhaps a million dead in a Europe of 150 million. He also admits that his friends accuse him of the same foolish optimism, which is why Candide feels a little bit like him. You leave knowing the three main characters, and warned that the dead in this book don't stay dead.

Transcript

Hello, my name's Salman Rushdie. I'm a writer. I write mostly fiction. I've written some non-fiction, a couple of memoirs, some books of essays. And I've even done a little bit of acting. I was in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I was in Bridget Jones's Diary. I played Helen Hunt's gynecologist in a movie, and I have a fondness for comedy and satire, so that makes me probably a good person to talk about Voltaire and in particular his novel Candide.

Voltaire was a French writer of the 18th century. His real name was François-Marie Arouet, and he adopted the name Voltaire for reasons that are obscure. Some people say that it's an anagram of the town where he was raised, but there are many theories and none of them make sense, really. It's just the name he chose, and became very famous as a satirist and intellectual in France in the middle of the 18th century.

His great target was the Catholic Church. He was an enemy of the Catholic Church, hence his famous phrase, which means crush the infamous thing, which is the church. And like many of the writers of what the French call les Lumières and what we in English call the Enlightenment, saw their main enemy not as the state but as the church, because the church was the organization which had weapons to place limiting points on thought, weapons like excommunication and the Inquisition. And as we'll see in the course of reading this book, the Inquisition is one of Voltaire's targets.

Now, I mean, I myself have done some writing which criticizes the excesses of radical religion and the corruption of the state. And so I feel a kind of fellow feeling with a lot of Voltaire, although there are some aspects of his thought, as we'll discover, with which I disagree quite radically.

He's a funny writer. That's one of the things to remember about him, that even though the subject matter of Candide indeed is quite dark, the tone of the book is always light and witty. And one of the ways in which he achieves this is to tell the story incredibly fast. It goes like a speeded up film, and that has the strange effect of taking even tragic events and making them look like slapstick comedy. And that's a deliberate effect.

I'd say a little bit about how I found out about this book. When I was 16, I was at boarding school in England, and I wasn't very good at French. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher, a man called Mr. Lewis, whose initials were P.G. And so of course we called him Pig. Pig Lewis introduced me to Candide by Voltaire. And I was so taken both by the book and by his teaching that I suddenly became really good at French. This conversation, in a way, is a tribute to that particular teacher.

This is the book that I had when I was 16 years old at school, in which I first read Candide. And as you can see, it's full of my notes of what words mean and so on. So I've managed to preserve it since 1963. So it's one of my older possessions. It shows you that the book meant a lot to me and has continued to do so. I return to Candide from time to time.

One of the reasons is the subtitle of Candide indeed is optimism. It's called Candide, or Optimism. And that subject, whether we can have an optimistic or a tragic view of the world, is very much what it's about. I myself have been accused by my friends of being absurdly optimistic, even when there's no reason, no particular reason to feel optimistic. And maybe we live in such a time, but I've always somehow had an almost foolishly optimistic streak. And so I feel Candide, who is, you might say, an innocent, you might say naive, you might say he's a fool, but he feels a little bit like me to me. And so I feel very close to him as he goes through a series of increasingly dreadful experiences and tries to keep that optimism intact.

Voltaire was reacting to the work of the philosopher Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was a kind of renaissance man. He was the man who invented the calculus. He's the man who invented binary mathematics. He was kind of a polymath. But what he also had was a philosophy of optimism, where he believed that the world as it exists is the best of all possible worlds, that things proceed for the best.

And this was this phrase, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that Voltaire took as his attack point from which the book emerges. And what happens, as you'll see, is that he tests that proposition by presenting the horrors of the world in the 18th century and pushing his protagonists through it.

One thing about the historical context: this book was written in 1759, and this was in the middle of a conflict called the Seven Years' War, which went from 1756 to 1763 and was an unbelievably bloody war, which maybe as many as a million people died, at a time when the population of Europe was only about 150 million. And it was a war, you could say, between the Protestant powers of Europe and the Catholic powers of Europe. So Germany and Britain were on one side, and France and Spain were on the other side. And really nothing was gained by anybody by the end of that, except for this colossal loss of life.

There was a subsidiary part of the Seven Years' War which took place in North America, at the end of which the French basically had to cede all their territories in North America. So they did quite badly. So Voltaire is writing in the middle of this convulsion, this European convulsion, and being horrified by it.

And again, we live at the moment in a time of multiple wars. There's the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, all of which have led to colossal loss of life. And one could react to them, maybe one should react to them, with a similar kind of horror. So I think this story from the 18th century has a lot to say to us now, because it comes out of a time not unlike the time through which we're living.

So there are three, probably three major characters in Candide indeed. The first is Candide himself, this young man brought up, interestingly, in Germany. Remember, Germany is on the other side of the Seven Years' War from France, and Voltaire is French. So he is having some fun at the expense of the Germans.

Candide, who is this innocent young man living in a castle with the absurd joke German name of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, which is invented to be as funny and absurd as possible. And the castle is a little ridiculous and not as impressive as its inhabitants think it is. So he is having some fun at the expense of German aristocracy.

Candide's great mentor is the philosopher Pangloss, who also lives at the castle. Pangloss is Voltaire's satirical reinvention of the actually existing philosopher Leibniz, whose philosophy he intends to demolish during the course of the book. The name Pangloss means every language, pan gloss. So he presents himself as a polymath, as somebody who knows everything about everything. And as we'll discover as the book progresses, he really knows nothing about anything.

But Pangloss is the one who instills in Candide the idea of optimism, the idea that the world is the best it can possibly be and that things happen for sufficient reason. And these phrases, the best of all possible worlds and sufficient reason, are phrases made famous by the work of Leibniz and are spoofed in this book by Voltaire.

The third person is the love interest, Belle Cunégonde, the beautiful Cunégonde, who is the daughter of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh. And she and Candide, to put it bluntly, fancy each other a lot. And that's the engine of the book. Just not to spoil the story, but it begins with the way in which love, and the exercise of love in desire, can lead to catastrophe.

And it's in a way about an expulsion from paradise, because Candide sees his life at Thunder-ten-Tronckh as being paradisiacal, edenic. After he, how shall I put it, misbehaves with Cunégonde, her father expels him. And so it's an expulsion, it's Adam being expelled from Paradise without Eve. And he comes out into the real world, and almost immediately the real world begins to tell him what it's actually like, which is anything but edenic. The war is raging. There are two fictional sides, the Abares and the Bulgars, fighting each other, each of them doing terrible things to each other. And Candide has to negotiate his way through that. You will learn as we go through the book what making love like a Bulgar actually is. And it's not polite.

One of the things that happens in the book is that you must never believe it when you think people are dead, because people die and come back to life in this book quite alarmingly. And one of those is the philosopher Pangloss, who we think of as having exited the story rather early, but who in this, even in these early chapters, re-emerges, and the adventures continue.

These first passages of the book are about the conflict between the ideals with which Candide has been raised, and in which he deeply believes, and the reality that he discovers in the world outside. In these chapters you'll meet, rather briefly, a very attractive character, Jacques, who is what was called an Anabaptist. The Anabaptists were people who didn't believe that children should be baptized, that baptism should wait for adulthood. But he's one of the few people in the book who has a generous heart, and so Voltaire leavens, if you like, the horror of the war with the introduction of goodness. So the two things are not in balance, perhaps, but at least they're both in play with each other. And Candide and Jacques and Pangloss and Cunégonde have to make their way through this darkening world.

So I think that's enough by way of introduction. Let's plunge in. There's a great deal to enjoy and enjoy reading. I'll be with you all the way.