Voltaire's Real Name: François-Marie Arouet

Quick answer: He was known as Voltaire, a pen name. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him François-Marie d'Arouet, and Library of Congress records citing the Académie française give François-Marie Arouet. Encyclopaedia Britannica says he was born in Paris and died there on May 30, 1778. He was the 18th-century French writer and philosopher, not any later performer using the name.

Real name and early life

Britannica says his birth certificate gives November 21, 1694, but he claimed on several occasions that he was really born on February 20. The Library of Congress records both dates from different authorities, so the exact day remains uncertain. The Stanford Encyclopedia says he was the fourth of five children of a well-to-do public official and an aristocratic mother.

Britannica names his putative father as François Arouet, a former notary who became a receiver in the audit office. Voltaire himself believed he was the son of an officer named Rochebrune. He lost his mother when he was seven and attached himself to his godfather, the freethinking abbé de Châteauneuf. He studied at the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where Britannica says he came to love literature and theater.

Career highlights

Britannica says that after he mocked the regent, the duc d'Orléans, he was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year in 1717. In 1718 his tragedy Oedipe succeeded, and the Stanford Encyclopedia says its published title page announced the pen name he used ever after.

After a quarrel with the chevalier de Rohan, who mocked his adopted name, he was again held in the Bastille and then left for England in 1726. Britannica says he stayed more than two years, learned English, and met Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. His Lettres philosophiques (1734) praised English thought, including Locke and Newton. The Stanford Encyclopedia says the book was publicly burned, and he fled to the estate of Émilie du Châtelet at Cirey, which was his base until her death in 1749.

He was named royal historiographer in 1745 and elected to the Académie française in 1746, according to the Library of Congress. He then joined the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia. Library of Congress records say he settled at Les Délices in Geneva in 1755 and moved to Ferney, just inside France, the following year. Britannica lists works including Candide, Zadig, and The Age of Louis XIV.

Death

Britannica and the Library of Congress record his death in Paris on May 30, 1778, shortly after he returned to the city.

Name notes for searchers

Britannica says the origin of the name Voltaire is uncertain, and that it is not certain it is an anagram of "Arouet le jeune." He also published under dozens of pseudonyms, and the Library of Congress lists many, including Docteur Ralph and the abbé Bazin.