Voltaire's Candide

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2012

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

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.

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0:45.9	Hello the French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire was one of the most prolific writers of the 18th century his output output, which includes historical, scientific and political
0:54.2	tracts, 50 plays and more than 20,000 letters is so vast that a new scholarly edition of
0:59.8	his complete works runs to more than a hundred volumes and has taken half a century to
1:04.1	compile. But much of Voltaire's fame rests on the success of one of his shortest
1:08.4	works. The satirical novella, Kondid, was published in 1759 when the author was 65. It was immediately banned and
1:15.9	immediately became a bestseller.
1:17.9	Valtez masterpiece tells the adventures of an innocent young man Kondid as he travels the world accompanied by the philosophy of Panglos,
1:24.5	a philosopher who constantly repeats his conviction that all is for the best in this best of
1:29.6	all possible worlds. Attacking religion, philosophers, literature, the army and human behavior generally, it's a breathless
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