History of Christian names

by Charlotte M. Yonge

The Pope did but sanction the Crusades; it was France that planned them. Frenchmen were the connecting link between the Lorrainer Godfrey, the Norman Robert, the Sicilian Tancred, the Provençal Raymond, the Flemish Baldwin. The kingdom of Jerusalem, though founded by the Lorrainer, was essentially French; the religious orders of knighthood were chiefly French; the whole idea and language of chivalry were French; and perhaps rightly, for France has at times shown that rare and noble spirit that can exalt a man for his personal qualities, instead of his rank, even in his own lifetime. The nation that could appreciate its St. Bernard, its Du Guesclin, its Bayard, deserved, while that temper was in it, to be a leader of the civilized world.

England was in these earlier days regarded as a foreign and semi-barbarous realm held by a French duke or count, while southern France was divided into independent fiefs of the empire. The names began to be affected by reverence for saints, and fast included more and more of the specially popular patrons, such as Jean, Jaques, Simon, Philippe. They became common to all the lands that felt the central crusading impulse, and the daughters of French princes, Alix, Matilde, the Provençal Constance, Alienor, Isabel, Marguérite, were married into all parts of Europe, and introduced their names into their new countries, often backed up by legends of their patrons.

Normandy lapsed to France through King John’s crime and weakness, and the persecution of the Albigenses, and the narrower views of the popes, changed the Crusades to a mere conquest of the Langue d’oc by the Langue d’oui, completed by the marriages of the brothers of St. Louis; and though Provence continued a fief of the empire, and the property of the Angevin kings of Naples, yet their French royal blood united it more closely to the central kingdom, and the transplanting of the papal court to Avignon, gave a French tinge to the cardinalate which it only recovered from at the expense of the Great Schism.

Philippe le Bel was the last able sovereign of France of the vigorous early middle ages; but the brilliant character of the nobility still carried men’s minds captive, and influenced the English even through the century of deadly wars that followed the accession of the House of Valois, and ended by leaving Louis XI. king of the entire French soil.

The ensuing century was that when the influence of France on other nations was at the lowest ebb. Exhausting herself first by attacks on Italy, and then by her savage civil wars, she required all the ability of Henri IV. and of Richelieu to rouse her from her depression, and make her be respected among the nations. Meantime, her nomenclature had varied little from the original set of names in use in the tenth century; dropping a few obsolete ones, taking up a few saintly ones, recommended by fresh relics, and occasionally choosing a romantic one, but very scantily; François was her only notable adoption. The habit of making feminines to male names seems to have spread in France about the eighteenth century, rather narrowing than widening the choice. Jeanne seems to have been the first to undergo this treatment; Philippine was not long after, then Jacqueline, and, indeed, it may have been the habit—as it is still among the peasantry of the South—always to give the father’s name to the eldest child, putting a feminine to it for a girl.

With the cinque-cento came a few names of literature, of which Diane was the most permanent; and the Huguenots made extensive use of Scripture names—Isaac, Gédéon, Benjamin, and many more; but the Christian name was quickly falling out of fashion. People were, of course, christened, but it is often difficult to discover their names. The old habit of addressing the knight as Sire Jehan, or Sire Pierre, and speaking of him as le Beau Sieur, had been entirely dropped. Even his surname was often out of sight, and he was called after some estate—as le Sieur Pierre Terrail was to the whole world Chevalier Bayard. Nay, even in the signature, the Christian name was omitted, unless from some very urgent need of distinction. Henri de Lorraine, eldest son of the duke of Guise, signs himself Le Guisard in a letter to the Dauphin Henri, son of François I. Married ladies wrote themselves by their maiden joined to their married title, and scarcely were even little children in the higher orders called by one of the many names that it had become the custom to bestow on them, in hopes of conciliating as many saints and as many sponsors as possible,—sometimes a whole city, as when the Fronde-born son of Madame de Longueville had all Paris for his godmother, and was baptized Charles Paris.

Now and then, however, literature, chiefly that of the ponderous romances of the Scudéry school, influenced a name, as Athenaïs or Sylvie; but, in general, these magnificent appellations were more used as sobriquets under which to draw up characters of acquaintances than really given to children. Esther is, however, said to have been much promoted by the tragedy of Racine.

The Bourbons, with their many faults, have had two true kings of men among them—Henri IV. and Louis XIV.—men with greatness enough to stamp the Bourbon defects where their greatness left no likeness.

There is something very significant in the fact, that these were the days when it was fashionable to forget the simple baptismal name. There was little distinction in it, if it had been remembered; Louis or Marie always formed part of it, with half-a-dozen others besides. As to the populace, nobody knows anything of them under Louis XIV.: they were ground down to nothing.

The lower depth, under Louis XV., brought a reaction of simplicity; but it was the simplicity of casting off all trammels—the classicalism of the Encyclopædists. Christian names are mentioned again, and were chosen much for literary association. Emile and Julie, for the sake of Rousseau; and, from Roman history, Jules and Camille, and many another, clipped down to that shortened form by which France always appropriated the words of other nations, and often taught us the same practice.