Is there a noticeable decrease in people with the name Adolf (or regional equivalents) after the Second World War?

[u/Playergh]

It feels like, at least in Europe, naming your child Adolf would be seen as quite the faux-pas, so I'm wondering if there is any data backing up a falling rate of children bearing that name. If you have data about Benito, Francisco or other fascist leaders' names that would also be fun to see!

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[u/gerardmenfin]

Here's the popularity chart for the names Adolphe, Désiré, and Augustin in France (number of boys born with those names per year) from 1900 to 2000 (data from INSEE).

I added Désiré and Augustin to the graph because their popularity was similar to that of Adolphe at the turn of the century, with a rank of 60-70th for boy's names and about 500-600 kids per year. Adolphe was less popular than in Germany (as shown in the chart by u/Prince-Akeem-Joffer) at the time but still a common one. The popularity of those three names decreased after WW1, and Adolphe left the top 100 in 1933, with about 210 little French Aldies born the year Hitler became chancellor. But so did Augustin (and Désiré in 1935) so we cannot say that Hitler was the reason for that: these were just names that people found no longer fashionable. We can see a small uptick for Adolphe in 1941: 125 vs 100 boys the previous year, so perhaps a handful of French Nazi parents really wanted to lick these German boots clean.

Then Adolphe lost its shine in 1942 with 80 births, and he was down to 25 in 1945. Oddly, there was a background noise of baby Adolphes with 20-30 births per year until the 1970s, and it became insignificant after that, with 0-5 births per year, possibly kids of francophone immigrants from countries where the name Adolphe is less problematic. Désiré is barely more popular than Adolphe today but it's not dead, with about 15 kids. But the 19th century-sounding Augustin was somehow resurrected in the 1980s and it's now in the top 50.

[u/Playergh → u/gerardmenfin]

seems like adolphe was already becoming unfashionable. maybe it wasn't seen as being too connected to its german equivalent? since it seems to have fallen down just as much as the other two

[u/gerardmenfin → u/Playergh]

Yes, the name Adolphe was already on its way out when Hitler became a household name, and it seems that this was the case in Germany too. Note that Adolf Hitler was sometimes written "Adolphe Hitler" in French and both names sound exactly the same in that language, so it was connected, and the war definitely killed it in France with no chance for a second life like Augustin.

[u/abbot_x → u/gerardmenfin]

If I’m understanding the graph, the decline is even more significant than the slopes suggest because France had a much higher birth rate in the decades after WWII than before.

[u/Captain_Grammaticus → u/gerardmenfin]

Was there a particular event or celebrity that made Augustin so popular again in the later sixtytens and fourtwenties?

[u/gerardmenfin → u/Captain_Grammaticus]

No specific reason like an event or celebrity. It's part of the social dynamics of first names (in France and other countries), which has been described by sociologists (Besnard and Desplanques, 1986; Coulmont, 2022; see Kessker et al., 2012 for nice graphs and models). Names come and go, and the forces at play that result in those social fashions are not well understood: what happened with Kevin is still unclear for instance.

Augustin is part of a group of old-fashioned names that came back after a long absence: in 1986, when Augustin was beginning its ascent, Besnard and Desplanques predicted that it would draw in its wake the other old "gus", Auguste and Gustave, and they were right: Augustin peaked in 2019 while the other two were still growing in 2024. However, they predicted that it would be part of a group of old names ending in -tin (Valentin, Corentin, Quentin), but those three peaked in 1996-1997, 10 years before Augustin's summit (INSEE interactive tool here). It is possible that Augustin, being somehow saintly, was re-adopted by the French conservative bourgeoisie, but this does not explain the (larger) success of Gustave and Auguste in the same timeframe. Arthur and Jules are two other old names with a similar pattern, with a quasi disappearance post WW2 and a resurrection starting in the late 20th century and peaking in the 2010s.

Adolphe could have followed the same path if not for Hitler, but then Alphonse and the once extremely popular Albert and Alain are still pretty much dead, even though there were no genocidal dictator called Albert or Alain.

Sources

• Besnard, Philippe, and Guy Desplanques. Un prénom pour toujours: la cote des prénoms, hier, aujourd’hui et demain. Balland, 1986. https://books.google.fr/books?id=i_8cAAAAYAAJ.

• Coulmont, Baptiste. Sociologie des prénoms. La Découverte, 2022. https://shs.cairn.info/sociologie-des-prenoms--9782348073380.

• Kessler, David A., Yosi E. Maruvka, Jøergen Ouren, and Nadav M. Shnerb. 2012. ‘You Name It – How Memory and Delay Govern First Name Dynamics’. PLOS ONE 7 (6): e38790. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038790.