Girard

Girard is a Germanic personal name wearing French clothes: ger, the spear, joined to hard, meaning hard or brave. It is the Gerhard behind English Gerard, one of the stock of such names the Franks left in Gaul, and France took it twice, as Girard and as Gerard. What is unusual is that this one never quite stopped being a first name: French reference works still enter Girard in both columns, as a masculine given name and as a surname borne in France and in Switzerland.

A single personal name can throw off a crowd of family names; more than ninety Italian surnames are thought to be built on Giovanni alone. Girard did the same work in France, standing up unchanged as the family name in one household and taking a particule and an estate name in the next. Bearers in different provinces were therefore namesakes rather than relatives, and the genealogists say so without embarrassment: the several noble houses recorded as de Girard have no proven filiation between them.

Girard is carried in every part of France and stands twentieth on the list of the country's most-borne surnames, but it lies thickest in the Vendee, where a commune carries it outright: Saint-Maurice-le-Girard. The oldest documented houses of the name sat in the same corner of the west. The Girard de Bazoges were Poitevin nobility, recorded in the Talmondais from about 1120 and extinct by 1563.

A second house lasted. The Girard de Charnace were of ancient extraction in Poitou and moved from there into Anjou, with a filiation genealogists can follow from 1500 onward, and they were still supplying officers three hundred years later: Henri-Augustin Girard de Charnace (1777-1847) served as a French soldier.

The earliest Girards the records catch are doing public business. Aimeric Girard, a French prelate, died in 1342, and Regnault Girard was Charles VII's ambassador in Scotland between 1434 and 1436.

Bernard de Girard, seigneur du Haillan, was born at Bordeaux in 1535 and died there in 1610. Secretary to Francois de Noailles, then secretary of finances to the duc d'Anjou, he was appointed historiographer by Charles IX in 1571 and charged with gathering and writing the national annals. Henri III kept him in the post, took the dedication of the 1580 edition, and named him genealogist of the Order of the Holy Spirit.

What he produced was the first body of national history any French writer had composed in the French language. His Histoire generale des rois de France, printed in 1576, ran a catalogue of kings from the legendary Pharamond forward and gave its second part to the institutions of the kingdom rather than to its battles. He swallowed some of the old fables, but he threw out a great many traditions every earlier writer had accepted, which is the difference between a historian and a chronicler.

Anthoine Girard was baptised in the Protestant parish of Petit Quevilly, in a suburb of Rouen, on 30 September 1594. His father, Antoine Girard, was described in 1619 as an honourable merchant burgess. It was a household that went to sea and paid for it: his brother Guillaume died in 1620 after a fight at the entrance to the Red Sea, and the younger Salomon (1599-1648) took up soldiering and was killed by the Turks on campaign in Crete.

The eldest son took the name apart and rebuilt it. He signed as Antoine Girard in 1625, as Antoine Girard, Sieur de Saint-Amant in 1627, and by 1629 as Marc-Antoine de Girard, escuyer, Sieur de Saint-Amant. That is a merchant's boy acquiring a particule, a squire's rank and an estate name inside four years, and it is precisely how a plain French surname put on its noble furniture.

A pirated printing of his poem La Solitude forced Saint-Amant to take charge of his own work, and the collected edition of 1629 went through twenty reprintings by 1668. When the Academie francaise took shape around Richelieu in 1634 he joined the founders. Every academician owed the company a formal discourse; he got himself excused by undertaking instead to work up the vocabulary of the grotesque and the burlesque.

He travelled in other men's suites. In 1633 he was one of the five hundred who went to Rome with the marechal de Crequy to ask Urban VIII to annul Gaston d'Orleans's secret marriage; while the marshal negotiated in vain, Saint-Amant talked with Galileo about his Dialogue on the tides, then went home and wrote La Rome ridicule, published anonymously in 1643, banned after copies were already circulating, with the bookseller imprisoned. He sailed aboard the Saint-Louis for the recapture of the Lerins islands in 1636, and went to England in 1643 with the comte d'Harcourt's mission to Charles I.

His money came from Poland. Louise-Marie de Gonzague, who liked his verses, married Ladislas IV Vasa in 1645 and made him a gentleman of her chamber with a regular pension, and did not require him to follow her east. In 1649 he went anyway. The Spanish arrested him at Saint-Omer and released him only on the strength of his Polish title; he left Amsterdam in March 1650 to cross the northern countries in deep winter, turned aside at Thorn to stand at Copernicus's tomb, and reached Warsaw for the birth of a royal child. Moyse sauve was published in 1653. He died in Paris in December 1661, and his biographers cannot agree on the day.

The Reformation carried the name across the Jura. Jehan Girard was Calvin's printer at Geneva in the sixteenth century, the man who set the reformer's words in type. Jacob Girard des Bergeries, born about 1615, came of an old family of Bourges; his father Nicolas was a physician and professor of Hebrew, and Jacob followed him into both trades. He studied at the Academie de Lausanne, at Basel and at Montpellier, took his licence in medicine in 1637, and practised at Lausanne while teaching Hebrew and medicinal plants. He was rector of the Academie in 1648 and left it his library, and he wrote for ordinary readers rather than colleagues: Le gouvernement de la sante in 1672, L'apotiquaire charitable in 1673.

Charles Rene Girard de Villars (1698-1769) took his degrees at Montpellier and Angers and practised medicine at Chantonnay between 1733 and 1741 before the royal college of physicians at La Rochelle admitted him to teach anatomy and surgery. He presided over La Rochelle's academy of letters and sciences in 1746, and in 1747 the Academie des sciences in Paris made him a correspondent, attached first to Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and, after Reaumur's death, to Antoine de Jussieu.

Joseph-Mathias Gerard de Rayneval was born at Masevaux in the Haut-Rhin in 1736 and served the foreign minister Vergennes as under-secretary of state for foreign affairs and trade. In 1776 he wrote a memorandum on France's strategic position in America; in 1782 he was sent secretly to London to put out peace feelers, and when John Jay learned of the trips he suspected the French of double dealing and opened separate talks with the British. The Paris peace treaty was signed on 3 September 1783. Rayneval sat in Louis XVI's Conseil d'Etat and died in Paris in 1812.

The name is on the map in six American states, in Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, and at the seat of Crawford County in Kansas; a Riviere a Girard runs down to the south shore of the St Lawrence in the Bas-Saint-Laurent. Poland has a whole town of it: Zyrardow is the polonised form of the name of Philippe de Girard (1775-1845), the French inventor.

Nicole Girard-Mangin (1878-1919) was the only woman doctor to serve inside the French army during the First World War. Stephen Girard (1750-1831) made his career in the United States as a shipowner, banker and philanthropist, and Jean-Yves Girard, born in 1947, is a logician and mathematician. In Canada, Alice Girard (1907-1999) was a nurse and a university professor. They make up a very large family of strangers, which is what a first name becomes when a whole country decides to keep it.