French Name Generator

What the French name generator does

So you want a French name. For a character in a book, a game, a family tree you are guessing at.

This gives you French names. Pull a stack and scan down the list.

Stick around, though, because until surprisingly recently there was a law about what these could be, it lasted almost two hundred years, and it was really a law about crushing everyone who was not quite French enough.

How to use it

Pick how many you want, press Generate, and Copy takes the whole set with you.

For 190 years, you could not name a French child whatever you wanted

Here is a date that sounds made up. Until 1993, French parents were not free to choose their own child's first name.

Nineteen ninety three. People who were alive and adult then were born under a naming law. It is younger than colour television.

The law itself was much older. It was signed on the 1st of April 1803, by Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the French calendar of the time the date has a wonderful name of its own: 11 Germinal, Year XI.

And it was strict. A French child's first name had to come from one of two places. Either a name in the calendars, which in practice meant the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar. Or the name of a figure from ancient history.

That was the entire menu. Pierre, Marie, Jean, Jeanne, the saints. Or the great names of Greece and Rome. Nothing else. The local official whose job was to register births, the officier d'état civil, would simply turn you away if you brought anything else.

Why would a government care this much about first names? Two reasons, and the first one is almost funny.

Napoleon was reportedly irritated by revolutionaries. In the fever of the Revolution, people had started giving their children aggressively political names, virtues and slogans and heroes of the moment, and the new regime wanted that to stop. A saint's name does not shout about the Revolution. So the calendar was, in part, a way of turning the volume down on a decade of political naming.

The second reason is not funny at all, and it is the real one.

The law was aimed at Brittany

France is not, and never was, a single people speaking a single language. It was assembled. And around its edges were regions with their own languages and their own names: Breton in Brittany, Basque in the southwest, Occitan across the south, Alsatian in the east, Corsican on Corsica.

A naming law that only allows Catholic saints and Greco-Roman figures does something very specific to those places. It makes their names illegal.

A Breton family could not register a child as Yann, which is the Breton form of John, or Gwenaël, an old Breton name. A Basque family could not use Iker, or Amaia. Those are not saints in the Roman calendar and they are not figures from ancient Rome, so the answer at the registry was no.

Read what that means. For nearly two centuries, an entire region could be told that the name it had used for its children for a thousand years was not an acceptable name for a French citizen. Not discouraged. Refused, at the desk, by law.

Historians of the law are blunt about the purpose: it was there to enforce civic uniformity and to suppress regional languages and identities. The name was one of the levers. If you cannot pass your language down in a place name or a poem, you can at least pass it down in your child's name, and the law closed that door too.

So this was never really about Pierre and Marie. It was a language policy wearing the costume of a naming rule, and the target was every family in France whose grandmother's name did not sound Parisian enough.

The rule was loosened here and there through the twentieth century. A list of accepted French names, with their correct spellings, was compiled in 1957, and it slowly took on some regional and foreign names. But it was not actually abolished until the law of 8 January 1993, which finally let parents choose more or less any name they liked.

Even now there is a catch, and it is a reasonable one. A registrar who thinks a name would harm the child, by exposing them to ridicule, can refer it to a prosecutor, and a family judge decides whether it stands. Courts have blocked names on those grounds. But the default flipped in 1993. Before, everything was banned except a list. After, everything is allowed except what a judge strikes down. That is the whole difference, and it is enormous.

The children accidentally named after a public holiday

Here is what happens when you tell people they must name children after the calendar, and then you hand them a specific calendar.

In some French colonies, a tradition grew up of naming a child after whatever was printed on the calendar for the day they were born. Simple, obedient, exactly what the law seemed to want.

But a calendar does not only have saints on it. It has other things printed on the days too.

The 14th of July is Bastille Day. The French national holiday. On the calendar, the Fête Nationale. And on a printed calendar, with limited space, that gets abbreviated.

Fêt. Nat.

So there are records of children, born on the 14th of July, who were duly named after what the calendar said for their birthday, and who ended up called Fetnat.

Named, in perfect good faith, after a squashed printer's abbreviation of a public holiday. Not a saint. Not a hero of antiquity. A typographical shortcut for Bastille Day, turned into a human being's name because the system said to use the calendar and nobody said which words on it counted.

It is the whole thing in one small joke. You try to control names by force, you point at a list, and the list does something you never intended, because language always leaks around the edges of any rule you build for it.

Taking a French name apart

Look at the surnames, because French surnames are unusually readable once you know the four buckets they fall into.

• Colours and looks. Roux means red, the redhead. Petit means small. Legrand, the tall one. These are a neighbour's observation, exactly like the Italian Rossi or the English Brown, and they are among the most common surnames in France.
• Places and landscape. Dubois is du bois, of the wood. Dupont is du pont, of the bridge. Fontaine, the spring. The family lived by the thing, so the family became the thing. That little du is just de le, of the, worn down.
• Jobs. Lefebvre is one of the great ones. It is an old spelling of le fèvre, the smith, from the same Latin root as the Italian Ferrari and buried inside the English word blacksmith. It is, again, the French version of Smith, and it is everywhere.
• Fathers. Names that are simply an ancestor's first name, sometimes with nothing added. Martin, the single most common surname in all of France, is a first name, from Saint Martin, doing duty as a family name.

So the anatomy of a French surname is the same story every other European surname tells. What you looked like, where you lived, what you did, or who your father was. Roux, Dubois, Lefebvre, Martin. Red-haired, from the wood, the smith, son of Martin.

One thing to watch on this page. A few of the surnames in the list, like Tremblay and Gagnon, are far more common in French Canada than in France itself. Tremblay is close to the most common surname in Quebec and comparatively rare in Paris. So they are genuinely French names, but if your character is Parisian rather than from Montreal, they are a slightly odd fit, and a French reader would notice.

Where these names come from

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

These were assembled by hand, one at a time, using given names French speakers actually use and surnames that are genuinely common. Hit Generate and it pulls at random from what is left, with nothing repeating inside a single batch.

It works entirely on your machine, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask

Was there really a law about French first names?

Yes. From 1803 until 1993, first names had to come from the calendar of saints or from ancient history. A registrar could refuse anything else. The 1993 law reversed the default, so now almost any name is allowed unless a judge decides it would harm the child.

Are any names still banned in France?

There is no list of banned names any more, but a registrar can flag a name they think would expose a child to ridicule, and a family judge rules on it. Names do still get blocked this way from time to time, so the freedom is broad but not total.

Why does every day in a French calendar have a name on it?

Those are saints' days, one per day, and if your name is on the calendar that day it is your fête, your name day. It is a leftover of the same system the naming law was built on, and some people still mark it, a little like a second birthday.

Do the accents matter?

To a French speaker, yes. François with the cedilla and Élise with the accent are the correct forms, and dropping the marks reads as foreign or careless. The accent is part of the spelling, not decoration on top of it.

Is Martin really the most common French surname?

It is, consistently. It comes from Saint Martin of Tours, one of the most popular saints in French history, and it shows how the saint system fed both first names and surnames. A first name became a family name across the whole country, independently, thousands of times over.

References

1. Do people still celebrate their name days in France? The Connexion. https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/do-people-still-celebrate-their-name-days-in-france/175351
2. 17 Baby Names That Have Been Forbidden In France. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/forbidden-baby-names-france_n_5a0908b2e4b0e37d2f385889
3. How French Names Work. NameFYI. https://namefyi.com/hi/guide/french-naming-system/
4. Timeline of the Napoleonic era, 1803. Napoléon & Empire. https://www.napoleon-empire.org/en/chronology/chronology-1803.php