Retired music promoter traces the origins of France's 34,875 commune names

Ever wondered about the origins of the names of France’s 34,875 communes?

Alain Baousson, 76, can provide the answer in his painstaking compilation Origine du nom de votre commune (Toponymie), a collection of 94 books released over the summer.

He launched the project in August 2021, initially as something to do to keep busy in retirement.

“I started with Morbihan, then the communes of Côtes-d'Armor, Finistère and Ille-et-Vilaine,” he said. “Little by little, I got carried away.”

Born in Brittany, readers will not be surprised to learn that he is a traveller at heart.

A love of music has been his main motivation for moving around, taking him from Perros-Guirec (Côtes-d'Armor) to Lorient (Morbihan) and finally to Nouméa in New Caledonia, where he has lived since 1985.

Many of his musical anecdotes are compiled in La bande son de ma vie: 60 années de musique, his 2024 self-published autobiography and another writing project he took up in retirement.

When asked whether Toponymie was a search for home and identity, he was unequivocal: “Certainly. Had I stayed in France, it could not have happened.”

Tracing the origins of French place names

How long have you been interested in toponymy – the study of place names?

It started in the 1960s, long before I knew I would leave for New Caledonia.

I sent letters to 10 communes in Morbihan, where I was living. Only five replied.

I asked myself the same thing when I lived in Lorient in 1985. It turns out it was named after the Soleil d’Orient, a ship built in the late 1660s by Louis XIV's East India Company and nicknamed ‘L’Orient’ during construction.

At that time, apart from dictionaries and atlases, there were few resources. Libraries might have had information, but government services did not.

After I moved to New Caledonia, the idea remained in the back of my mind.

When I retired, I thought I would have enough time to tackle this.

I started with Morbihan, then the communes of Côtes-d'Armor, Finistère and Ille-et-Vilaine. In a month and a half, I had covered all the departments of Brittany and found it enjoyable. Then I thought: ‘Why not do Pays de la Loire?’ Then: ‘Why not Normandy?’

Little by little, I got carried away.

What’s the main lesson you learned from working on Toponymie?

Given the large number of communes, you would need to put it all in a metaphorical washing machine to extract fundamental patterns.

In Brittany, many names come from the Celts, the Bretons, England or the Anglo-Norman islands. Normandy is closely linked to waves of Viking invasions. But eastern France has different influences. To understand the origins of the population of the Massif Central would require in-depth work. Near Toulouse, I remember names from Occitanie, even from the Languedoc area, influenced by Muslims and Arabs.

What did it teach you about the history of France and the French language?

Over time, you develop a kind of intuition to figure out the reasons behind place names. Regardless of invasions, over 2,000 years France has seen many waves of settlement.

When people say they are French, they have not been French for very long, in a sense. It has been a constant succession of invasions, with extensive mixing of peoples, blending the Romans, the Greeks, the Celts from central Europe, all of that. This mixture is what made France.

People settled, built homes, worked. Commune names often came from the most important person in the area or because there was a river or a mountain nearby.

You grew up in Perros-Guirec, one of many coastal towns on what is known as the Côte de Granit Rose, where the rocks are supposedly pink. I say ‘supposedly’ because it feels like a bit of a stretch...

When you are on the water, it is really pink. It is less striking on land, I agree.

Did you go to Ploumanac'h? Because there are huge pink rocks there. If you visit again, go to the Mean Ruz lighthouse and tell me the rocks aren’t pink.

A lifetime of music and radio

Tell us about your other passion – for music and radio. When did that start?

I used to listen to Salut les copains, the most popular radio show back then, alone in the kitchen when I got back from school. I was around 12 at the time.

You eventually picked up Radio Caroline, which was anchored off Felixstowe…

That was what I listened to every evening from 21:00. The music you listen to as a teenager is etched in your memory and shapes your culture. There were the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks and the Small Faces. They had it all.

Salut les copains would broadcast French versions of these songs, revisited by Johnny Hallyday, Richard Anthony, Eddy Mitchell, Claude François or Sylvie Vartan.

You spent years DJ-ing and working as a music promoter, meeting some of France’s most famous songwriters such as Jean-Jacques Goldman, Johnny Hallyday, Bernard Lavilliers, Jacques Higelin or Renaud. Did you meet Mick Jagger by any chance?

No, but I did meet Mike Oldfield and Murray Head.

Dire Straits was the last concert I organised. That was in Brest, on May 29, 1985, the night of the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool FC and Juventus, what is known as the Heysel Stadium disaster. We had decided to broadcast the game ahead of their performance. The band members watched the game, supporting Liverpool. When we saw how it was going, we cut everything and put the group on stage.

An extraordinary encounter with Alain Colas

One journalist described you as ‘the man with a thousand anecdotes’. Do you have one for our readers?

One day in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), I was with a friend watching round-the-world sailor Alain Colas on his boat, Manureva. The crew could not lower its mainsail. My friend said it was like a tennis court entering the port. When the crew shouted for help, I organised a rescue boat. Ten minutes later, I pulled Colas out and held his foot, which had been completely severed by the sail – only his Achilles tendon was still attached. The fire brigade took him to hospital in Nantes. Later, at the first Route du Rhum, I saw him limping on deck but thought it was not the moment to remind him I had held his foot!

Colas disappeared at sea in November 1978, during that very first Route du Rhum. Neither he nor his boat were ever found. Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Chamfort wrote a song about the boat, called Manureva.

It’s a song people dance to in nightclubs, even though it’s about someone's death and disappearance. That is precisely what I want to say. Even something that initially has nothing to do with music ends up in music.

I once met Louis Bertignac, the founder and guitarist of French band Téléphone, in Nouméa. He is someone I would have expected to meet in a bar in Paris when I was DJ-ing. Here he is, 17,000 kilometres away from France, buying cigarettes in the tobacco shop I own, and I’m asking him questions about a particular concert he gave 20 years ago.

Origine du nom de votre commune is available in bookshops and online and is broadly organised by department number, with each book in the series priced €12.95.