On Voltaire’s Name
No-one knows where the name Voltaire came from. The man himself was born François-Marie Arouet. He was known in his family, when a boy, as ‘Zozo’, and late in 1718, after the start of his literary fame (he had been writing since a teenager, but his breakthrough was the staging of his play Œdipe in Paris, earlier that year), he renamed himself:
In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire. A postscript explains: “J’ai été si malheureux sous le nom d’Arouet que j’en ai pris un autre surtout pour n’être plus confondu avec le poète Roi” [“I was so unhappy under the name of Arouet that I have taken another, primarily so as to cease to be confused with the poet Roi”]. This probably refers to Adenes le Roi, and the ‘oi’ diphthong was then pronounced like modern ‘ouai’, so the similarity to ‘Arouet’ is clear, and thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Voltaire is known also to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime.
But why Voltaire? Nobody knows for sure. There are four main theories.
1. Richard Holmes’s ‘Voltaire’s Grin’ suggests (the theory is not original to him: it was first suggested all the way back in 1820) that it’s an anagram of Arovet Li — the second portion of this being L.j., the abbreviation of ‘le jeune’ ‘the young’, and Arovet being the Latinized version of his surname, Arouet. (‘By a swift transposition of letters, “Arouet Le J” became “Voltaire” … Arouet had done something strikingly modern: he had repackaged himself under a new brand name.’) This seems like a stretch to me.
2. Roger Pearson, in his biography [Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (Bloomsbury 2005)] says this: ‘according to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as le petit volontaire (“determined little thing”) as a child, and he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life.’ By this logic, Voltaire would mean ‘wilful’ (or, strictly, ‘wi’ful) which seems like an odd quality to highlight in a pen-name.
3. Ira Owen Wade thinks ‘the name may have been taken from Volterra in Italy’. There was no specific connection between Voltaire and Volterra, but (says Wade) ‘Volterra had the distinction of being the hometown of Aulus Persius Flaccus, a Roman satirical poet born there on December 4, 34.’ Voltaire, Wade avers, knew the poetry of Flaccus and sometimes wrote satirical verse himself. So: shrugs … maybe?
4. Pearson also notes that ‘Voltaire’ reverses the syllables of ‘Airvault’, his family’s home town in the Poitou.
Of the four, that last looks the most likely to me.
I wonder why nobody has considered a simpler explanation? Early in 1717 Voltaire was arrested and sent to the Bastille for eleven months (it was there that he wrote, or at least finished writing, his Œdipe) for repeating certain rumours, and writing a satirical poem about them. Those rumours were that Philippe II, Duke of Orléans — Regent of France from 1715 to 1723, and de facto king — had fathered a child upon his own daughter, Louise Élisabeth, Duchess of Berry. The young Duchess was certainly pregnant in early 1717, and the identity of the father was a mystery (her husband the Duke had died in 1714). She took, it seems, a number of lovers, before and after her husband’s demise — [a phrase that always makes me think of that scene in Woody Allen’s Love and Death: “BORIS; any news of cousin Sonja? GRUSHENKO: only zat she and Voskovec are unhappy. She takes luffers!” BORIS: “she takes uppers?” GRUSHENKO: lovers. BORIS: oh, lovers.”]
Writing a poem suggesting that the de facto king had incestuously impregnated his own daughter was a dangerous thing to do. Writing a play — worse, a hit play — about Greek myth’s most infamous incestuous relation was adding danger to danger. Still, Voltaire was released from the Bastille, April 1718, and as soon as he was out he changed his name. Is it so hard to see the new moniker in this context? Vol is a flight — it’s what a bird does — but also an escape. Taire means: to silence, to censor, to shut somebody up. Isn’t this Voltaire’s situation? He has escaped the prison in which the Regent had locked him away, he was not being silenced, he was flying free. Might his letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau — saying he didn’t want to be ‘counfounded with’ [confondu avec; the phrase might mean ‘confused with, (by other people)’ or it might mean ‘mixed up with’] le poète Roi, the Poet-King — be a reference to the Regent rather than to any actual poet? ‘Poet King’ in the sarcastic sense that this de facto King of France had sent Voltaire to prison for his poetry. Voltaire = ‘to silence flight’, to clip a bird’s wings, an ironic account of what Voltaire himself had just experienced? ‘Flight [in]to silence’. We might translate j’ai été si malheureux sous le nom d’Arouet as ‘I’ve been unhappy with the name Arouet’ but it might also mean: ‘I’ve been unlucky under the name Arouet’. Maybe 1718 was time for a change.
Hmm. Not sure.
