Most Common French Last Names: Top 100 From 73 Million Births

Most lists of common French surnames copy one another, and none shows its working. The French statistics office INSEE publishes the data behind them: a file of every surname given at least 30 times at birth in France from 1891 to 2000, with births in each decade ^[insee]. We counted it. The answer is Martin, by a wide margin. The file also shows how the list changed over a century and which name leads in each département. Everything here is computed from INSEE's files and can be downloaded as CSV.

This post is about how common each name is, not what it means. If you need French names for a form, a story or a test file, the French name generator builds first and last names from locale data. The last name generator gives you surnames alone.

The 100 most common last names in France

The table counts births in France from 1891 to 2000. The rate is births per 100,000 in the whole file, which is the fairest way to compare names. The last column shows where each name ranked among babies born in the 1990s, so you can see which names are still climbing and which are fading.

Four kinds of name fill the list. Old given names used as surnames: Martin, Bernard, Thomas, Robert, Richard, Laurent, Simon and Michel. Nicknames: Petit, Blanc, Brun, Roux and Legrand. Places and features: Dubois, Dupont, Fontaine, Riviere and Lacroix. Trades: Fournier, Mercier, Boyer, Meunier and Marchand. Four Spanish names, Garcia, Martinez, Lopez and Sanchez, sit in the top 100 by 1891-2000 totals, and all four rank far higher among 1990s births. The full CSV goes down to number 1,000.

What is the most common last name in France?

Martin, by a wide margin. INSEE records 250,013 births with the surname Martin from 1891 to 2000, or 340 per 100,000. Put another way, about 1 birth in 294 is a Martin. Bernard is second with 131,330, so Martin leads by 90%. No other gap in the top 100 comes close.

Martin was first in every one of the eleven decades in the file. In the 1990s alone, 21,622 Martins were born, against 11,138 Bernards. It is also the most common surname in 30 of the 101 départements of birth, from Paris to the Rhône, and it ranks second or third in 22 more.

Why these numbers are higher than the lists you have seen

Most online lists give Martin 228,857 births, Bernard 120,573 and Thomas 108,141 ^[wiki-list]. Those figures come from INSEE's earlier edition, which stopped at births in 1990 ^[progedo]. The file used here is the 2018 edition. It adds the decade 1991 to 2000, and 21,622 more Martins with it. The order of the top ten is the same in both editions, so the older lists are out of date, not wrong.

Two more things explain the numbers. First, INSEE counts births, not living people. The data comes from the national identification register, and people born before 1946 who died before 1972 are not in it ^[insee]. So the file holds 3.3 million births for 1891-1900 but 7.7 million for 1991-2000, and the early decades are undercounted. Second, the file lists only surnames with at least 30 births. Everything rarer is pooled under 'other names': 5.5 million births, or 7.4% of the total.

What a century changed: Garcia, Da Silva and Martinez

The top of the list is remarkably stable. Martin and Bernard were first and second among babies born in the 1890s, and first and second among babies born in the 1990s. Twelve of the 1890s top 15 were still in the 1990s top 15. The names that climbed are northern: Lefebvre went from 17th to 10th, Leroy from 16th to 14th and Fontaine from 60th to 16th.

The newcomers tell the story of immigration. Garcia had 148 births in 1891-1900 and ranked 2,716th. In 1991-2000 it had 9,150 births and ranked 8th. Da Silva had five births in the 1890s and 7,127 in the 1990s, enough for 17th place. Martinez went from 75 births to 6,876 and 19th place.

Spanish names came first, then Portuguese, then Vietnamese and West African. The Portuguese names appear twice, in two spellings: Rodrigues and Rodriguez, Fernandes and Fernandez, Goncalves and Gonzalez. INSEE writes names without accents, so the spelling is the only thing that separates a Portuguese Fernandes from a Spanish Fernandez. The same applies to Lefebvre and Lefevre, which INSEE keeps as two names, at 13th and 28th.

The old southern names lost half their share

Which names faded? We compared each name's share of births in 1891-1900 with its share in 1991-2000, for names with at least 1,000 births in both decades. The biggest falls are all names from the south of France: Bousquet, Lacoste, Marty, Imbert, Pages, Fabre, Roux, Raynaud and Delmas. Each lost about half its share.

They did not shrink. Roux had 4,911 births in the 1890s and 5,800 in the 1990s. Fabre went from 2,749 to 3,110. But total births in the file more than doubled over the same period, so a name that only held steady lost half its share. Roux fell from 11th among 1890s births to 28th among 1990s births, Blanc from 18th to 54th, and Fabre from 44th to 118th. The changes CSV has both decades for every name in the top 1,000.

The most common surname in every département

INSEE's second file breaks the births down by département of birth, for names with at least 30 births in that département ^[insee]. Martin leads in 30 of the 101 départements. Moreau leads eight, mostly in the west: Charente, Charente-Maritime, Deux-Sèvres, Indre and Indre-et-Loire. Faure leads six in the centre and south-east. Lefebvre leads the four big northern départements, Nord, Pas-de-Calais, Seine-Maritime and Eure, and Blanc leads four in the Alps and Provence.

The map is most interesting at the edges, where regional languages shaped the names. Le Gall leads Finistère and Le Gal leads Morbihan. Muller leads Moselle and Bas-Rhin, and Meyer leads Haut-Rhin and the Territoire de Belfort. Etcheverry leads the Basque Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Albertini and Bartoli lead the two Corsican départements. In La Réunion, Payet has 32,638 births, more than Martin has anywhere; Paris, Martin's biggest département, has 13,531.

Two leaders are given names used as surnames in the Caribbean and Normandy: Jean-Baptiste in Martinique, Louis in Guadeloupe and Joseph in Guyane, and Marie in Calvados and Manche. Garcia leads two départements on the Spanish border, Aude and Hérault. The départemental file does not say where 14.2 million births took place, 19% of the total, so every count below is a minimum.

How many surnames does France have?

French surnames are far more spread out than American ones. INSEE's file lists 218,982 surnames with at least 30 births, and the ten most common cover only 1.7% of births. In the United States, the top ten cover 4.7% of people ^[us-post]. It takes 145 French names to cover a tenth of births, 1,115 to cover a quarter and 9,608 to cover half.

The file also shows how INSEE writes names. Everything is upper case with no accents or cedillas, so Müller and Muller, or François and Francois, are one row each. Hyphens, spaces and apostrophes are kept: 3,611 names contain a hyphen, 8,939 contain a space and 537 an apostrophe, such as D'Aboville and Abd El Kader ^[insee]. A hyphenated double name counts as its own surname. Our script keeps all of this as INSEE wrote it and only changes the case for display.

Using French surnames in test data

These counts matter if you build forms or seed databases for a French market. A realistic customer list is not evenly spread: in 1,000 French births you would expect three or four Martins, and one or two each of Bernard, Thomas, Petit and Robert. A file where every surname is unique will never exercise your duplicate handling.

• Weight by frequency to test matching. Use the per-100,000 column in the CSV as weights to build a realistic file with repeated surnames.
• Keep accents, particles and hyphens. INSEE stripped them, but real data has François, D'Aboville, Le Gall and Jean-Baptiste. Our name validation test cases cover the forms that break software.
• Draw evenly when you need variety. A demo or a screenshot looks better without four Martins, so an unweighted list such as our French name generator fits better.

Download the data

Four files hold everything on this page. The top 1,000 CSV has births per decade, the rate per 100,000 and the share in the first and last decade. The département CSV lists the ten most common surnames in each of the 101 départements of birth. The changes CSV has the rank of each top-1,000 name in 1891-1900 and 1991-2000, and the summary file holds the totals. They are CC BY 4.0, so reuse them with a link back. INSEE's files underneath are open data.

Method note: the script downloads INSEE's national and départemental text files, about 10 MB in total, and checks their column layout before counting. It treats the 'other names' line as births without a listed surname and keeps it in every denominator. Shares by decade divide by the births in that decade, including other names. The départemental file writes the overseas départements as 9A to 9E and leaves 14.2 million births without a département, which the script reports but does not assign.