Voltaire tried at least 178 pen names; one of them stuck forever
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), better known as Voltaire, was the Enlightenment’s tireless satirist and philosophe. He worked in almost every genre—plays, poems, novels, history, science—and left more than twenty thousand letters plus some two thousand books and pamphlets.
He claimed, dubiously, to have been born in February 1694 as the illegitimate son of a nobleman. The Jesuits schooled him in Latin, theology and rhetoric at the Collège Louis-le-Grand from 1704 to 1711, and he later mastered Italian, Spanish and English. His father wanted a lawyer; the son pretended to clerk for a notary in Paris while writing poetry, was packed off to study law in Caen, and kept writing anyway. A posting in 1713 as secretary to the French ambassador at The Hague ended within months after a scandalous affair with a Protestant refugee nicknamed Pimpette.
A satirical verse accusing the Regent of incest with his daughter earned him eleven months in the Bastille. Seven months after his release, in November 1718, his first play, Œdipe, triumphed at the Comédie-Française, winning medals from both the Regent and George I of Britain. That year he became Voltaire. The name may be an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinised surname plus the initials of le jeune; family lore links it to a childhood nickname, le petit volontaire; and it reverses the syllables of Airvault, the family's home town. Richard Holmes adds echoes of voltige and volte-face, and notes that Arouet sounded uncomfortably like roué.
His second play, Artémire, flopped in 1720. Refused a licence for his epic on Henry IV, he took it to the Netherlands in 1722 with his mistress, admired Dutch tolerance, and had La Henriade printed clandestinely in Rouen, the copies smuggled into Paris after he survived smallpox in 1723. Mariamne failed in 1724 but, reworked, entertained guests at Louis XV's wedding the following year.
Across his career he attacked the Church, slavery and censorship, argued for religious tolerance and a constitutional monarchy, and in Candide mocked Leibniz's claim that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
Source: Voltaire
