Je Suis Charlie—The Baby, Not So Much

A baby posing for the camera

A year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and French Slate‘s poser, “Will 2015 Babies Really Be Charlie?” the answer is, decidedly, non.

After an uneven uptick in the number of Charlies born in France over the last decade, the final number for the city of Paris in 2015 was 29 girls and only 6 boys. According to OpenData.Paris, in 2004, 12 girls were named Charlie; by 2014, the number had shot up to 71. For boys, the name didn’t make a mark until it went, literally, from zero to 30 in 2012; in 2014, it had only crawled up to 35 bouncing baby boys who’d been named Charlie.

Obviously, the probably isn’t saddling your kid with a lifetime of “Je suis Charlie” introductions and jokes because that’s not how French works—there’s no social significance to the phrase, “Je m’appelle Charlie,” except that it sounds profoundly English. And according to Le Parisien last year, some parents were giving kids the name Charlie as a middle, third, or fourth name.

Charlotte has hummed along in the mid-100s throughout the decade, but her nadir came in 2013, not 2015. Charles, another time-tested workhorse, averaged about 80 Parisian births a year, 2015 saw its second-best showing in the last five years, down from 87. Not a single parent in Paris named their son Chuck this year or, indeed, any year.

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