At least one French civil servant has decided that Juliet had it all wrong: a rose by any other name would not, in fact, smell as sweet.

Or at least not as much like a baby: On 15 December, the Défontaines family of Busigny will appear before a judge who will decide whether or not they will be allowed to name their newborn baby boy "Daemon"—that's the Latin spelling of "demon," if you're keeping score at home—after a character in the television series Vampire Diaries.

Many, many things about this are funny to me. Where to start...

  • First of all, the title of the story in Le Figaro: "Daemon : prénom diabolique devant la justice" ("Daemon: Devilish Name to be Brought Before Judge"). I don't know if she wrote the title as well, but kudos to Figaro journalist Christine Ducros for working quality Beelzebub humor into the story.
  • When pronounced in French, the name "Daemon Défontaines" sounds exactly like "Demon of the Fountains." Excellent!
  • According to Le Figaro, M. and Mme. Défontaines even dropped in on their priest, who reassured them that having a first name invoking The Beast would in no way present an obstacle to their son's baptism. Who wouldn't have liked to be a fly on the wall for that conversation?
  • The names of the Défontaines' other two children? Lucas and Mathéo. That's right: names derived from the authors of two of the four official New Testament Gospels. Are they planning to stage mini-armeggedon scenarios around the house or what?

Anyway...all this satanic fun notwithstanding, there remains the very real question of how much freedom one ought to have in the naming of ones offspring. As an American I'm pretty used to the idea that you can name your kid whatever the hell you want, consequences for said child be damned: a quick look at a bizarre celebrity baby name list bears this out nicely.

Even when baby names cross the line from weird and/or funny to full-on creepy, in America the rights of the parents tend to hold sway. A recent court case involving a New Jersey couple who in 2010 named their newborn baby boy Adolf Hitler Campbell is a good example: although little Adolf and his two sisters—whose middle names are, respectively, "Aryan Nation" and "Himmler Jeannie"—were eventually taken away by child services, it wasn't due their blatantly white-supremacist, genocidal names but rather to suspected child abuse and neglect (that is, child abuse unrelated to giving your children such horrific names). In most US states, you really can name your baby just about anything.

Not so in France. There is a complex and comically unclear set of regulations in place, some of them dating all the way back to the First Republic (1792-1804), laws drawn up in an era when name-based rights and privileges previously enjoyed by nobility were being eviscerated in bloody revolutionary style. According to these laws, babies were only to be named after "names found on various calendars" and "the names of known historical figures." This law, vague (which calendars? what constitutes a "known" historical figure? etc.) and mostly concerned with eliminating noble privilege though it may have been, was the law of the baby-naming land until 1966(!), at which point a series of equally unclear but much less restrictive laws came into being, culminating in the current standard, adopted in 1993.

It is by this standard that the Défontaines will be judged (taken from Article 57 of the all-powerful Civil Code):

When (the chosen names), either by themselves or in combination with one another or with the family name seem, in the judgment of the government official, to be contrary to the interest of the child...he is to inform the District Attorney, who can refer the case to family court...if the judge deems the name contrary to the interest of the child, he can order it stricken from civil record and, in the absence of an appropriate alternative, will himself ascribe a name that conforms to the interests of the child.

And there you have it: no names that are "contrary to the interests of the child." Nothing ambiguous about that. Nonetheless, not only can a baby's name be rejected for violating this totally arbitrary regulation, but a judge can name your child for you if he doesn't like your second choice.

In other words, there aren't going to be any Adolf Hitler Duponts in France any time soon. But a Daemon Défontaines? We'll have to wait to 15 December to find out.

UPDATE: Daemon denied!!

15 December 2011

And so it came to pass: the French court charged with settling this dispute has ruled that the Défontaines will not, in fact, be permitted to name their newborn son Daemon. Despite presenting evidence that another child (also in the north of France...what the hell's going on up there??) was recently named Daemon sans problème, the couple was forced to change the name to something more acceptable or, in accordance with the law cited above, risk having their child named for them by an agent of the state. They even offered to compromise by leaving out the "e", which would've resulted in the reasonably common anglophone name "Damon," but the court wasn't having any of it. (Everybody remembers Damon Bailey, right? He didn't turn out so bad. Damon Wayans? He's funny enough. In fact, this Damon has compiled a list of famous Damons in an effort to "normalize" the name. At this point, I think the French court was just being vindictive.)

Sigh. Sure, it's lame to name your kid after a television show character (especially one named Daemon), but think about it this way: if you don't trust people to name their children, how can you trust them to raise them? By this logic, we ought not stop at policing the naming process and go ahead and have social services take the kid away altogether, right? What this decision basically says is, "yes, we think you're totally incompetent parents—remember, the French law reads "contrary to the interest of the child"—but the only punishment will be that you have to name your kid Pierre or Philipe."

What I can't find anywhere, however—and I really am dying to know—is what the kid's name ended up being. Did they try something else audacious and risk having the baby named for them, or did they go conservative after all the hassle? For some reason, this crucial piece of the puzzle has been left out of every story I've found on the subject.

Maybe they decided that publishing his name would be contrary to the interest of the child as well.

UPDATE, ROUND II: Daemon reanimated!

13 January 2012

It's the story that won't die! This morning, several weeks after the affair seemed closed, La Voix du Nord reports that a family court judge has somehow overturned the first family court's judgment of 15 December and allowed little Daemon keep his name.

I smell foul play.

The story gives no information as to how this unexpected turn of events came to be—there doesn't seem to be any legal recourse for such an unusual appeal, and the curious chain of events more closely resembles one of those Law & Order moments where cops wander from one judge's chambers to another until they find someone who owes them a favor than any sort of legitimate legal maneuver—and finishes with the oblique comment that "no appeal by the state will be made."

Do you think it's possible that someone woke up with Mr. Ed's head in his comforter? I'm just sayin'.