girl's name
Garance
ga-RAHNS
- Origin French
- Gender Girl
- Letters 7
- Popularity Top 1000 (France)
- Births on record 14,250
France
#106
2025 births
Garance is a girl's name taken from the madder plant, whose root gave Europe its most important red dye before synthetic colors. It ranks 106th in France and appears in no other market we hold.
- Garance is a name of French origin.
- Peaked in France in 2021, when 595 babies were given the name.
- It has been rising over the past decade in France.
- Today about 1 in 1,203 babies in France is given this name.
- First appears in birth records in 1950.
Garance over time
Births per decade in France, 1950s to 2020s. The striped bar is the 2020s, still in progress — it covers 2020 to 2025, not a full ten years.
Show the numbers
| Decade | Births |
|---|---|
| 1950s | 5 |
| 1960s | 15 |
| 1970s | 260 |
| 1980s | 260 |
| 1990s | 1,465 |
| 2000s | 4,070 |
| 2010s | 4,945 |
| 2020s (to 2025) | 3,220 |
What Garance means
Garance means madder — the plant Rubia tinctorum, whose root produces a deep red. The name is the color and the plant at once, in the way Rose and Violette are, but it names a dye rather than a flower.
Where Garance comes from
Garance is the French for madder, from a Frankish root, and the plant was the source of the red that colored European cloth for centuries: alizarin, the pigment in its root, gave the rose madder of painters and the red of French army trousers until 1914. Synthetic alizarin was made in 1868 and the cultivation collapsed within a generation. The name's modern use follows Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis, filmed under the Occupation and released in 1945, in which Arletty plays a woman who has taken Garance as her name; the film is routinely voted the greatest in French cinema, and the name barely existed before it. It is one of a small set of French names — Garance, Capucine, Colombe — that read as unmistakably French because they are ordinary French nouns.
Garance in use
Garance ranks 106th in France with about 490 births in 2025 and is rising in our data with a peak in 2021. It appears in no other market we hold at all, which makes it one of the most strictly French names in the top 200. Our records carry it from 1950, five years after Les Enfants du Paradis, and the timing is hard to read as coincidence.
How popular is Garance?
In 2025, Garance was given to 490 babies in France, ranking #106 that year. It is a well-established, commonly used name.
Where Garance is used
French counts are rounded to the nearest five and nothing below five is published, so these figures show the shape of the name's use rather than an exact tally. Data & sources.
Names that peaked alongside Garance
These names rose and fell in the same era, which is why they tend to sound like they belong together.
Parents who like Garance also like
Names whose popularity has risen and fallen in step with Garance over the last century — the same taste, a different name.
Sibling names for Garance
Names from the same era that won't rhyme or share an initial with Garance — the two things that make a sibling set grate.
Common questions about Garance
What does the name Garance mean?
Garance is the French word for madder, the plant whose root gave Europe its principal red dye.
Where does the name Garance come from?
Its modern use follows Arletty's character in Les Enfants du Paradis, released in 1945.
Is Garance used outside France?
Essentially not. It appears in no other market in our data.
How do you pronounce Garance?
ga-RAHNS, with a nasal ending.
How popular is the name Garance?
In 2025, Garance was given to 490 babies in France, ranking #106 that year. It is a well-established, commonly used name.
Is Garance a girl's or a boy's name?
Garance is given almost entirely to girls in birth records.
When was Garance most popular?
Garance peaked in 2021, when 595 babies were given the name. It has been rising over the past decade.
Is Garance a good name?
That is not something records can settle, but they can tell you what you would be choosing. Garance currently ranks #106 in France. It has been rising over the past decade. Everything else — how it sounds with your surname, who it reminds you of — is yours.