Every morning, Nicolas Turon pays tribute to his department with a funny, tender and knowing text, in the form of a declaration of love for the Moselle. He chooses an emblem belonging to history or current events and treats it in an offbeat way.
While the most common surnames in Moselle were until now almost exclusively professional names crystallized by time and history, here comes in 13th place in the ranking a new kid whose onomastic register did not yet appear on our palette: I named… the SCHWARTZ! Yes, I know, 13th place, plus Schwartz, all that remains is to summon a cat, a ladder and a broken mirror to get the complete picture of unfortunate superstition… But far be it from me to overwhelm the few 2,700 SCHWARTZ families who live in our department. As you can see, SCHWARTZ simply means “black” in German.
While “inland” France is full of Lebrun, Blanc, Leroux, Moselle puts SCHWARTZ at the top of the most popular colored surnames… Nothing strange in the land of coal and iron ore. In Moselle, it happens that even the good weather looks like a storm. Rainbows are made of rust, black and gold; their foot systematically falls in Luxembourg, where the cauldron of gold is located. Our SCHWARTZ faces are cousins to those from Pas-de-Calais, the English from Birmingham, the Americans from Wyoming.
SCHWARTZ can also be used as a common noun: working at SCHWARTZ does not mean being an underground miner, but working undeclared. Lost in a street or a house without light, we will say that we are in the SCHWARTZ.
Let's have a thought this morning for the first graders born SCHWARTZ who must master the writing of their surname: if the stock price were indexed to Scrabble scores, the little SCHWARTZ would be CAC 40 tycoons…
France
