Volatile, Volte-Facing Voltaire Have you ever considered changing your name? Maybe once or twice? Well, what about 178 times? This was the case of one of the most famous writers, poets, and philosophers in history, who used various pen names in order to avoid scorn, exile, beatings, and imprisonment for, in summary, not being able to keep his mouth shut. François-Marie Arouet, who is better known by his pen name Voltaire, was born November 21, 1694 to the upper-middle class family of François Arouet; a lawyer, his wife; Marie Marguerite D'Aumart, and two older siblings; Armand Arouet and Marguerite Catherine Arouet. Voltaire’s mother came from a family of nobility and had known a life of luxury, unlike his father, who had to work hard for most of his life. When Marie passed away when Voltaire was just seven years old, his father quickly sent him down the path of education and connections to become a lawyer, hoping for his son to be able to obtain a life of prosperity through a well-paying job. He attended the Collége Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit secondary school in Paris, and received a classical …show more content…
This artform, which was a dangerous one during this time under the French absolute monarchy, was Voltaire’s favorite. In many of his works, Francois-Marie Arouet criticized his society; in fact, he signed everything "Ecrasez l'in-fame," or "down with infamy." His famous work, Candide, satirizes the popular philosophy of optimism promulgated by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz that held that since everything was created by God, and since God is perfect, then everything in the world must be also perfect.(Westwood, 1) We can infer that because he was so mistreated and (at first) scorned by society, Voltaire must have used his life experiences as fuel for his satire