page_title: Mononymous person
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Mononymous person / Post-medieval uses / France
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Molière painted at Avignon c. 1658, after which Molière and the artist formed a lasting friendship Čeština: Portrét Molièra namalovaný v Avignonu kolem roku 1658
context_page_description: A mononymous person is an individual who is known and addressed by a single name, or mononym. In some cases, that name has been selected by the individual, who may have originally been given a polynym. In other cases, it has been determined by the custom of the country or by some interested segment. In the case of historical figures, it may be the only one of the individual's names that has survived and is still known today.
context_section_description: Some French authors have shown a preference for mononyms. In the 17th century, the dramatist and actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73) took the mononym stage name Molière.
  In the 18th century, François-Marie Arouet adopted the mononym Voltaire, for both literary and personal use, in 1718 after his imprisonment in Paris' Bastille, to mark a break with his past. The new name combined several features. It was an anagram for a Latinized version of his family surname, "Arouet, l[e] j[eune]"; it reversed the syllables of the name of a family château, Airvault; and it has implications of speed and daring through similarity to French expressions such as "voltige", "volte-face" and "volatile". "Arouet" would not have served the purpose, given that name's associations with "roué" and with an expression that meant "for thrashing".
  The 19th-century French author Marie-Henri Beyle used many pen names, most famously the mononym Stendhal, adapted from the name of the little Prussian town of Stendal, birthplace of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whom Stendhal admired. 
  In the 20th century, a fourth French writer, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (author of Gigi, 1945), used her actual surname as her mononym pen name, Colette. Some French actors and singers have used their given name or surname as a stage mononym.
  Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910) was an early French photographer.
caption: Molière, 17th-century French dramatist
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