French Town Name Generator

French village names are some of the most evocative in Europe, and most of them are built from a small kit of recurring parts. Saint- marks a parish named after its patron saint (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie). Château-, Castel-, and Roque- point to a castle or rock. Ville-, Villefranche, and Neuf- record medieval new towns, and the fortified bastides of the southwest (Monpazier, Mirepoix, Cordes-sur-Ciel) were planned settlements laid out on a grid in the 1200s. Suffixes do the rest: -sur-Mer (by the sea), -sur-Loing (on the river), -en-Auge or -en-Provence (in that region), -les-Bains (spa waters), and -la-Rouge or -la-Jolie (the red one, the pretty one).

Regional languages leave their mark too. Breton names like Locronan, Plougastel, and Pont-Aven come from Celtic Brittany; Alsatian names such as Riquewihr, Eguisheim, and Kaysersberg are Germanic; Basque towns like Espelette, Ainhoa, and Sare sit near the Spanish border; and Occitan roots run through the south in names like Gordes, Uzès, and Najac. That is why a French town can sound entirely different from one at the other end of the country.

All of the names here are real, correctly accented villages and small towns, many of them listed among Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. They work well as ready-made settings, or as templates when you want to invent a plausible town of your own.