History of surnames in France

A surname is a hereditary name passed from one generation to the next that identifies the family a person belongs to. It arose from the need to tell apart people with the same first name as the population grew.

Origin of French surnames

• Baptismal names: the father's given name became the family name, as with Martin, Bernard, Thomas and Richard, the most common in the country.
• Occupations: Lefebvre and Lefèvre (smith), Fournier (who ran the oven), Mercier (merchant) and Boulanger (baker).
• Places: Dubois (from the wood), Dupont (from the bridge), Fontaine (fountain) and Rivière (river), or the name of a home village.
• Nicknames: Petit (small), Legrand (the tall), Roux (red-haired), Moreau (dark-skinned) and Leblanc (the white).

The history

Surnames appeared in France in the 11th and 12th centuries, first among the nobility and then across the population; by the end of the Middle Ages they had become hereditary. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) required baptismal registers, which helped fix names in writing.

The Revolution created the civil registry in 1792, and the law of 6 Fructidor Year II (1794) forbade anyone to bear a name other than the one in their birth record. The spelling of names, until then variable, became fixed, leaving many variants of the same name, such as Lefebvre, Lefèvre and Febvre.

The regions have their own traditions: Breton names with Le (Le Gall, Le Goff), Alsatian names of Germanic origin (Muller, Schmitt, Meyer), Basque and Occitan names in the south. In the 19th and 20th centuries immigration from Italy, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and Asia enriched the range of names, as Garcia, Da Silva and Nguyen show in the ranking.

The maps on this site show where each surname is most widespread and can help you discover its origin. Surname rankings