Alsatian surnames are the surnames held by people who live in the province of Alsace in the east of France. The province, which is centered on the city of Strasbourg, has a long border with Germany and has been the focus of extensive political and military conflict between France and various German states for many centuries. Many studies present Prussia/Germany’s seizure of Alsace and the province of Lorraine from France at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) as an act of naked aggression, one which was righted following the First World War when Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France. However, Alsace had been conquered from the German states by King Louis XIV of France in the seventeenth century and from a cultural perspective Alsace could be said to be part of Germany. This is reflected in the surname landscape here and even today the majority of people in Alsace carry Germanic rather than Francophone surnames.
History of Alsatian surnames
Alsatian surnames today are a mix of French and Germanic influences, with German-sounding surnames and surnames derived from various Germanic dialects, being much more dominant here than French ones. This might strike one as incongruous when we consider that Alsace is a part of France and that the return of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to France from Germany after the First World War was deemed to be an issue of national honor at the time. The inference was that Prussia/Germany had stolen these inherently French provinces from France at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 and that the post-First World War restoration of them to France was a remedying of a grave act of aggression on Prussia/Germany’s part back in the early 1870s.[1]
The evidence of Alsatian surnames would suggest otherwise. Alsatian surnames are primarily Germanic because for much of the last two millennia Alsace really might be said to have been more a part of Germany than France. Its position as a border-zone was established through the divisions of the Carolingian Empire back in the ninth century. Thereafter it gravitated towards Germany politically, culturally, socially and linguistically, with people here largely speaking German dialects in late medieval and early modern times. Alsace’s connection to France politically only really began in the seventeenth century when it was conquered by King Louis XIV of France during a period of nearly half a century when he tried to extend France’s borders into the Low Countries and eastwards to the River Rhine.[2] Hence the conquest of Alsace (if not Lorraine) by Prussia/Germany in 1870–1871 was something of a return to the pre-seventeenth-century situation. Though Alsace was subsequently restored to France and remains a part thereof today, Alsatian surnames speak to the country’s tangled history, with a mix of Germanic and Francophone surnames, amongst which Germanic names are dominant.[3]
Alsatian naming conventions
Naming conventions in Alsace follow a mix of German and French surname conventions. Hence one will find some quite common French surnames such as Martin and Michel. However, German-type surnames are much more numerous, reflecting the country’s greater ties to German culture over the centuries. Amongst these one will find German surnames that have a uniquely Alsatian aspect to them, specifically because Alsace has also been impacted by the idioms of Swiss German owing to the proximity of Switzerland to the south.
Finally, anyone studying census returns and other genealogical sources for the Alsace region will also be struck by the high number of Jewish surnames here. Owing to successive expulsions of the Jewish people from France in late medieval times, substantial communities of Jews formed in the Alsace region, which lay beyond the control of the French crown at that time. This ensured that in the first half of the nineteenth century, prior to the conquest of the province at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, tens of thousands of Jews lived in Alsace, representing approximately three-quarters of the Jewish community of France as a whole.[4]
Most popular Alsatian surnames
Some of the most Germanic surnames found in Alsace are:
- Müller – An occupational surname which infers that an ancestor was a ‘miller’. It is the most common surname in Germany as a whole and highlights the German influence over surnames in Alsace.
- Schmidt – The Germanic equivalent of the English Smith. Both surnames are occupational and indicate that an ancestor was a blacksmith or a metalworker of some kind.
- Meier – A term referring either to a ‘mayor’ or a kind of landlord in medieval times. The spelling in Alsace reflects a Swiss influence and differs from the more common rendering, Meyer, in Germany itself.
Some of the more common French surnames in the province are:
- Martin – The most common French surname of all, one which may ultimately derive from the Roman god of war, Mars, and which became a way of describing a soldier or military figure in the High Middle Ages.
- Michel – A highly popular French surname, one which is largely a patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Michael’.
- Henry – This is traditionally viewed as a French surname, though it is one that is ultimately of Germanic origin. It was introduced by the Normans into northern France and derives from Haimirich or Heim-ric, which transliterates as ‘home-ruler’. It is consequently an occupational surname of a kind in that it refers to a local lord.[5]
Famous Alsatians
- Francois Christophe Kellermann – One of Revolutionary France’s foremost generals and later one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Marshals of the Empire. He hailed from Strasbourg. His name is quintessentially German in origin, being an occupational surname that described a ‘cellar man’, meaning an ancestor was possibly a vintner.[6]
- Alfred Dreyfus – A French army officer from the town of Mulhouse near both the Swiss and German borders at the time of his birth in 1859. An Alsatian Jew, he became the focus of a long-running controversy in French society between 1894 and 1906. He was accused, though ultimately exonerated, of passing French military secrets to the German government. The Dreyfus Affair shone a light on French anti-Semitism at the height of the Belle Époque.[7]
- Marcel Marceau – One of the most famous mime artists in history. Marceau is a typically French surname, though it was not Marcel’s birth one. He was a Jew from Strasbourg whose original surname was Mangel. He changed it to Marceau in 1940 after the Nazi invasion and occupation of France in an effort to avoid being detained.[8]
- Charlotte de Turckheim – A well-known French actress. She was born in the Paris metropolitan area, but hails from an Alsatian family that were members of the Protestant nobility there over several centuries. Her surname evinces both French and German influences.[9]
See also
Explore more about Alsatian surnames
- France, Vital Records Index record collection on MyHeritage
- France, Compilation of Vital Records, 1585-1928 record collection on MyHeritage
- Filae Family Trees record collection on MyHeritage
- 1921 France Census record collection on MyHeritage
- French Emigrants: They Were Not All Huguenots, or Nobles, or from Alsace-Lorraine at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (Second Edition, London, 2001).
- ↑ C. C. Eckhardt, ‘The Alsace-Lorraine Question’, in The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 5 (May, 1918), pp. 431–443.
- ↑ Peter Sahlins, ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century’, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 5 (December, 1990), pp. 1423–1451.
- ↑ Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1920 (Stanford, 1988).
- ↑ https://forebears.io/france/grand-est/surnames
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francois-Christophe-Kellermann-duc-de-Valmy
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2011/the-dreyfus-affair--the-separation-of-church-and-s/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/marcel-marceau-wwii-french-resistance-georges-loinger
- ↑ https://www.geni.com/people/Baron-Jean-de-Turckheim/6000000083236343844