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French name generator

First names given in France in the decade your character was born, from Insee's national records since 1900, with how common each one was.

    Given names: Insee, Fichier des prénoms (1900–2022), Licence Ouverte 2.0. France publishes no open family-name records, so family names appear only before 1900. Older centuries: Wikidata, people born then by citizenship or birthplace, untitled, women and men counted apart, CC0.

    What changes from decade to decade

    For the first half of the twentieth century French names barely moved. Marie was the most given girl's name and Jean the most given boy's name in every decade from the 1900s to the 1950s. Then the old order broke quickly: Sylvie and Philippe led the 1960s, Sandrine and Christophe the 1970s, and by the 2010s it was Emma and Gabriel.

    Hyphenated names tell you when a character was born. Jean-Pierre, Marie-Claude, and their kind made up fewer than one birth in a hundred among the popular names before the 1930s. In the 1950s it was nearly one in ten. Today they are rare again, so a Jean-Luc of thirty would stand out.

    A law shaped the older names

    Until 1993, a French registrar could refuse a name that was not on the calendar of saints or drawn from history. That is why the lists before the 1970s are so short and so alike. Since the law changed, parents choose freely, and a registrar can only ask a court to step in.

    Why most decades have no family names

    France publishes no open record of family names by frequency, and this generator uses only data that is free to reuse, so the decades since 1900 give first names alone. The 1600s to 1800s come with family names, drawn from people of those centuries recorded in Wikidata. For a modern character, pair the first name with a family name from the region they come from; a Breton, an Alsatian, and a Provençal surname each place someone at once.

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