The Middle Ages gave people many nicknames.
France boasts the richest onomastic heritage, with over a million different surnames.
This diversity is linked to the origins of surnames: they were not established by the state but emerged spontaneously in the Middle Ages. Initially, these were simple nicknames used to distinguish people with the same name. Over the decades, these nicknames gradually became hereditary. Since then, they ceased to be tied to an individual and became associated with a family, thus transforming into the surnames we know today.
Such a variety of surnames also reflects the linguistic diversity of France in the Middle Ages, including Breton, Picard, Alsatian, Occitan, Gascon, Catalan, Corsican, and Provençal languages.
An interesting fact: 5% of surnames are enough to cover 80% of the population of France! Just 1,000 surnames account for a quarter of the population. Thus, the distribution of surnames is far from uniform.
The most common surnames are derived from first names: Martin, Bernard, Durand, Thomas, Robert, Richard, Simon, Michel, Laurent… in every village, there was once one or several sons of Martin or Thomas.
The surname Martin, which tops the national ranking, leads in about thirty departments. The surname Moreau is prevalent in the Centre and Nouvelle-Aquitaine regions.
Surnames originating from blacksmithing are widely spread in the north (Lefevre/Lefebvre), in Franche-Comté (Fayard), and in the south (Faure/Fabre). Spanish surnames dominate in the Mediterranean, in the departments of Aude and Hérault (Garcia, Martinez, Lopez, Sanchez, Perez…), with families bearing them being descendants of migrations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Here are the top 10 most common surnames in France:
Martin
Bernard
Moreau
Petit
Lefebvre
Durand
Dubois
Leroy
Thomas
Robert
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