Because some ignoramus thought that the Latin name CAMILLA is related to CAMELLIA. In fact, the camellia got its name from Linnaeus, who wished to honor the illustrious Czech botanist Jiri Josef Kamel, who discovered the flower during his travels in Asia.
shareIn France, "Camille" is a man's name.
shareIt's mostly a woman's name, in French.
shareHow recently? The male composer Camille St. Saens lived from 1835-1921, and the artist Camille Pissarro lived from 1830 to 1903.
In English-speaking countries, male names have a tendency to become female over time. Florence, Jocelyn, and Vivian used to be male names (the actor Joss Ackland's real name was Jocelyn, he was born in 1928). Maybe the same thing happened to the French name Camille.
Even in the "old" times there was also female Camilles (Camille Claudel comes to mind), but yeah, using wikipédia as a reference, there are more male Camilles than I remembered. It seems like an almost 50-50% situation. Thank you for that.
So, I'd say that, historically it's one of the rare French "unisex" names, but in recent times, the feminine gains from the masculine. In people under 50 years old, you will find a lot more women than men. Not very scientific, I know.
Yeah, Wikipedia is never "very scientific", but you've done more research than I could be arsed to do!
So maybe the pattern for French has the same trend as in English, where male first names become female over time. Maybe the process works faster for English-speakers, where a name can switch from male to female over time, which my dad Marty has had happen.
Even for the French language, you may be right about this pattern, now that I think of it. With the small detail that the spelling may change over time to reflect the genre it is used.
Valéry (male) is now rare, but not Valérie (female).
Carol (very rare) → Carole (common)
etc.
I'll surely think about this thing for a while!