On September 22, 1663, thirty-six young women arrived in a French colony on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in a region that we now call eastern Canada. While the men of the colony greeted them eagerly, the women were whisked away by an order of nuns already living in the area. These sisters would protect and train the women for their calling as wives and mothers, soon to be matriarchs of all New France, as it was then known. Over the next decade, hundreds more women would make this transatlantic journey, and nearly all remained to marry and bear children. They turned the fur trading colonies into self-sustaining settlements that formed the basis for present-day Quebec.
Today, two-thirds of all Canadians of French descent can trace their lineage to one of these women, widely known as the filles du roi or the King’s Daughters. The name was coined by Marguerite Bourgeoys, founder of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal, and referred to the dowries that a small percentage of them were provided from Louis XIV, as the king might have given his own daughters. These women and girls, some as young as fourteen, had been recruited for their purported fertility, hardiness, and moral character. They were to become the mothers of a new generation of colonists whose presence in that region of North America would cement France’s dominion over it. If the act of conquering land was men’s domain, the king needed women to create emotional and physical connections to the land itself, ensuring these regions remained under French control.
The challenge facing the king was that the French men already sent to settle parts of New France had mostly become itinerant fur traders. Without a reason to return to one place, such as running a farm or visiting a family, settlements were failing to thrive and were at risk of being lost to the nearby Iroquois or British. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister and advisor, took measures to ensure that wouldn’t happen. In 1670, he issued an edict threatening to rescind hunting licenses and other privileges of unmarried French settlers. Colbert was also aware that a century earlier, the British had successfully implemented a program similar to what became the filles du roi in the Virginia colony. He designed filles du roi in partnership with Jean Talon, the great Intendant of Quebec. Colbert oversaw financing and recruitment for the program while Talon supervised the women upon arrival and saw to it that each was successfully married off.
Weekly Newsletter
The newly arrived women had to be able to endure relative isolation, survive winters harsher than they were used to in France, and possess the constitution to bear numerous children. It seems an unlikely option to appeal to many, but the opportunities becoming one of the filles could provide were alluring, particularly among the residents of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which served more as an asylum or prison at the time. Some scholars suggest that many of the filles were sex workers, likely due to the Salpêtrière’s later reputation for housing women arrested as such. As Aimie Kathleen Runyan writes, during the time of the filles du roi program, the Salpêtrière provided housing to women and girls suffering from health conditions as well as to orphans, the homeless, and female criminals. The sisters who ran the hospital required a strong work ethic of its residents. Those healthy enough were put through a daily regimen of religious education and physical schooling intended to train them to be pious and obedient. The sisters were familiar with each resident and recommended only those they felt could succeed in Quebec.
Word spread about the program in the port cities of La Rochelle and Dieppe, where more filles were recruited on the recommendations of local priests and judges. Though Talon requested only those aged sixteen to thirty, the youngest filles were fourteen, and a dozen women aged forty and over were also sent; the eldest who participated was fifty-nine. Perhaps those filles who had aged out of childbearing were sent to help run the farm and households of any men who were widowed and left with children.
As Gustave Lanctôt notes in his seminal work on the filles du roi, cited by Runyan and other scholars, selected women were provided with a generous trousseau containing clothing, sewing supplies, and other household items, including scissors and knives. The wealthiest filles were also given dowries of roughly fifty livres (about the equivalent of roughly $750 USD today) to entice them and to reassure their suitors of their suitability. Most men in Quebec were working-class, but the few officers and men of rank there required noble wives; French culture in the seventeenth century balked at marriage between nobles and non-nobles lest bloodlines be tainted, writes historian Guillaume Aubert. Over the decade that 770 filles arrived in North America, about sixty came from such wealthy households. These were likely the daughters of newly ennobled families, women who would have been at a disadvantage in the European marriage market, where strict class structures meant that lineage was more important than household income. In France, they would never have married into the highest social strata. In Quebec, they ascended to the highest ranks of society. Most of the women endowed with a dowry came from this echelon, though towards the end of the program, dowries were also provided to the less elite, including the British-born Catherine de Lalore, who lacked any connections to French aristocracy. Arriving with her dowry in 1671, she quickly married and went on to mother eight children.
Talon, along with Bourgeoys and Marie de l’Incarnation, founder of the Ursuline Order, were underwhelmed by the women selected for the first voyage. Too many of them, they found, hailed from cities and were emotionally unprepared for lives of isolation and hard work. In letters to her son, Incarnation asserted the need for subsequent waves of filles to include more farm girls capable of physical labor. “We no longer wish to ask for any girls except those from villages, suited for men’s work,” she wrote, per Runyan’s translation of the letters from Incarnation. “Experience has led us to see those who were not raised up for it, who were not suited for [life] here, being in a misery out from which they cannot pull themselves.”
The sisters were invested in the success of the program as a reflection on their ability to train and mentor the filles to succeed in the colony. Upon arrival, the women were typically brought to live in the convents. Interactions with local men were carefully chaperoned, with would-be suitors invited to visit three days a week at specific times. All visits were supervised by the sisters as well as Talon or one of his deputies. Still, this was far more independence than any of the women might have enjoyed back home. The ability to choose their own husbands was so unfamiliar that many of the would-be brides became overwhelmed, turning to the sisters for advice on the decision. Having to make a life-altering decision based on short, supervised visits was challenging. As noted by Runyan, “Many of these women entered into a marriage contract, or even several, before actually marrying one of the Canadian settlers.”
Colbert and Talon hoped marriages would occur within two weeks of women’s arrival, but historian Yves Landry writes that most marriages occurred months later, as the women took time to select appropriate partners. The men weren’t vetted as their potential wives were, and many cultural mores survived the transatlantic voyage. Once the women left the convent to marry, they fell under their husbands’ legal authority. When marriages seemed to fail, there was no real option to divorce. Infidelity was discouraged, but when it occurred, women were blamed more than their husbands were, as evidenced by the fallout of the disastrous marriage of Marie Major.
More to Explore
Quebec, Louis Hémon, and Maria Chapdelaine
Sergine Desjardins encountered the story of Major, her ancestor, and turned this research into the 2006 novel Marie Major. As Desjardins outlines, Major arrived as a fille du roi in 1668, having been recruited from the Salpêtrière, where her family had imprisoned her for refusing to marry the man they had chosen for her. In Quebec, she got to choose, landing on Antoine Roy dit Desjardins. Following the marriage, Desjardins engaged in an affair with another fille du roi, Anna Talua. When Talua’s husband, Julien, discovered the infidelity, he murdered Desjardins. Julien was briefly imprisoned, paid a fine, he was soon free. The fallout was more severe for both Talua and Major: the former was banished from Quebec; it’s unknown if she remained in outlying areas of New France or if she returned to Europe. The latter struggled to raise her son alone and without income. Had Julien died, she may have been able to remarry. With him alive, she was tainted by association with his poor behavior. She attempted to work as a midwife, but owing to her proximity to the scandal, she wasn’t called upon to provide these services, despite the baby boom ushered in by the filles du roi program.
The filles program lasted ten years, ending in 1673 when French involvement in Holland required the financing previously expended on the costly filles du roi program. By then, the filles had done their job: the colony was thriving. The physical attributes that helped these women get recruited likely led to their low rates of maternal mortality. Most filles gave birth to at least five children, many of them more, and reared them largely alone, as their husbands were often away.
The influence of these women is evident even now in the French dialect spoken in Quebec. Prior to the arrival of the filles, the men of New France spoke in a variety of distinct vernaculars they brought with them from their rural French hometowns. The filles, mostly from larger cities, arrived with their own urban argots. As primary caretakers of their children, they passed these to the next generation. This Parisian-influenced accent became, through time, the distinct Quebecois French taught in Canada today, with its closer roots to eighteenth-century France than contemporary French in Europe.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
