December 8, 2018 • 25 mins
We're revisiting an episode from 2014: the Filles du Roi, or King's Daughters. While the building of a population in a new colony seems like a tricky endeavor, France's King Louis XIV launched a scheme to do just that by shipping eligible ladies to New France in the 1600s.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey everybody, and Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we're
going to have an installment in our six impossible episode series,
and one of those impossible episodes that we mentioned throws
back to Le fi Droix, which was the French effort
to send eligible women to New France to correct a
gender imbalance that had developed there. This is the oldest
episode that's getting a shout out in the one that's
(00:23):
coming out this week, or at least in terms of
ones that have not already been reissued as Saturday Classics,
so we thought it would be a good time to
re release it for listeners who weren't tuned into the
show back in July, or could use a refresher on
this bit of Canadian history. And please pardon my terrible
pronunciation of French and sometimes also English in this episode.
(00:48):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today's
topic is one that we have had many requests for,
especially since I mentioned when we were doing our Maurice
(01:11):
Duplace episodes that I wanted to do more Canadian history
and It's also one that's actually been on my list
for quite a while, but I will not tell a lie.
The thing that tipped the balance and kind of shifted
this way up was a request from one of our
youngest fans, Zell and her dad Tony, who wrote as
a very charming email, so bone that you made. Uh. So,
(01:33):
this one is going to be about French Canadian history
and the colonization of New France. And while the building
of a population in a new colony seems like a
rather tricky endeavor and it is, uh, Francis, King Louis
the fourteenth launched this scheme to do just that by
shipping eligible ladies to do France in the sixteen hundreds
so they could be brides and helped build out this population.
(01:55):
And how did this play out? You may or may
not be surprised, but we will tell you all about
its earning now. So, after Europe became aware of these
giant new continents new to their minds, the Americas, all
of that land became contentiously battled over by all the
various European power players. Spain and Portugal struggled with one another,
(02:15):
primarily to rest control of South America, while North America
became a battleground for France and England, and in sixteen
o eight Samuel de Champlain built the first domicile in Quebec,
and consequently he's sometimes referred to as the founder of
New France. And this, of course, we're giving you very
broad strokes. It's an oversimplified version of the story. But
(02:37):
I mostly just wanted to establish the official founding of
this settlement in the early sixteen hundreds. In those early years,
the primary industry of New France was the fur trade.
For the fifty five years after de cha Plan founded
the settlement, it was run by commercial companies. The Canadian
colony was primarily run by the Compagnie de Santas Socier,
(02:58):
which had honest to develop the North American French territory
in exchange for rights to the land resources. And so
what started primarily as a group of fur trappers and
traders did indeed grow, and soon there were dock workers
to handle the incoming and outgoing shipments of fur. There
were shopkeepers because they had to have some form of
(03:19):
commerce that was supporting all of these people. Uh, and
there were other workmen that came to New France. But
really it was all about supporting the fur trade, uh
and most of these were men that were on their
own or who had left their families behind. So bringing
women and children across the Atlantic to a new territory
that was still covered in wilderness wasn't generally thought of
(03:40):
as profitable by the men who were settling New France.
Adding more mouths to feed, and these were mouths that
wouldn't be able to contribute to the bottom line of
the fur trade really seemed like a losing proposition on paper.
From the standpoint of a for profit business looking to
stay profitable, this was of course the wisest course of
action to you know, leave behind the women and children.
(04:01):
But from the point of view of a country that
was actually looking to colonize the land that it had
claimed abroad, this became a huge problem. After fifty five
years of letting the company to Santa Associate run the
settlement effort, less than one percent of the land that
France had claimed was actually occupied by Europeans. There were
(04:21):
a mere three thousand settlers in New France, and by comparison,
British colonists numbered in the low six figures. There were
more than thirty times as many of them as there
were French colonists. So we've talked many times before about
the lengthy and contentious history between Britain and France before
this vast gap in colonial development was kind of an
(04:44):
embarrassment for France's part, and seeing how poorly the corporate
settlers had managed things in terms of population growth, uh,
and how the national pride had kind of been tanked
by it. King Louis the fort teenths and the other
leaders in France made a move to rectify the situation,
(05:05):
so New France was then placed under the rule of
the monarchy. The Sun King was extremely keene on incentivizing colonization.
He really really wanted to have an established, truly settled
French presence in North America, and what he needed to
make that goal was families. Yeah, we're not going to
(05:27):
diverge a bunch about Louis the fourteenth and the Sun
King's legacy, but he really there was some pretty explosive
colonization growth for France all over the world under his rule,
So this was something he obviously was really invested in
and cared about. And since the men who had been
working the fur trade were largely single, as we mentioned,
and there were few ladies in New France that were
(05:48):
actually eligible for courtship. The king, along with the Intendant
of Quebec, Jean Talon, and the King's Minister of Finance,
Jean Baptiste Colbert. I'd have no idea if he's related
to Stephen Colbert, so can't help you there. If that
just popped your mind. Uh. These three men concocted this
plan to fill the gap in the sexes and even
out the numbers. Uh. And so when this initiative that
(06:11):
they came up with was started in sixteen sixty three,
there were six men for every woman in New France,
and some most of those women were already uh betrothed
or married to men already, so they were not available women.
From sixteen sixty three to sixteen seventy three, a program
was sent into motion, and this sent marriageable ladies, who
(06:31):
came to be known as le fi DUIs or the
King's daughters, to New France to become brides, mothers, and
really the backbone of the settlement in many ways. Colbert
arranged the recruitment and bon voyages of the women from France,
and Tolon made sure that they were taken care of
when they reached North America. As part of this field,
(06:51):
the French monarchy paid for the transit of these young
women as a government expense, and the French West India
Company handled their transport and was paid quite handsomely for
each each woman that it transported. Yeah, they were basically
considered very very important cargo because the King really really
wanted this whole thing to be successful. And while there
(07:13):
had been women who traveled to Canada certainly prior to
this initiative to make their way and hopefully find husbands,
those women traveled on their own dime. It was not
part of this sort of government sanctioned effort. UH sixteen
sixty three really marks the beginning of subsidized import of
potential brides from France. The term via dou wos was
(07:34):
first coined by Marguerite Bourgoi, who founded the Congregation of
Notre Dame in Montreal in the sixteen fifties. Her convent
was normally the place where these young women would be
welcomed once they arrived in New France, and the convent
would care for them during the transition, and was characterized
as part of helping with France's very important colonization mission. Yeah,
(07:57):
they took this responsibility very very seriously. Uh. And before
we talk about who these young women really were, do
you want to have a quick word from a sponsor.
Sure thing. So, getting back to the fie doui, the
(08:18):
backgrounds of these ladies who set out for the Americas
as part of this program were actually pretty diverse. There
have been times where you'll see in sort of the
quick and dirty history accounts of them like, oh they
were all you know of low birth. Oh no, they
were all genteel ladies. But really it really was pretty diverse.
Some were from fairly well off families, not a lot uh.
(08:41):
And these women would travel with their bridal trousseau sort
of ready to start their own families with the men
they would meet in the colony. Others had been recruited
from country areas. Some were in fact orphans from the
streets of Paris. And in the case of the very
poor daughters of France, the state provided an assortment of
useful household goods as their trousseau and also allotted each
woman a small dowry. And these sort of state uh
(09:05):
provided trousseau normally included like a ladies valise or some
sort of case for carrying a handkerchief, ribbons, a supply
of needles and white thread, scissors, a hairbrush, stockings, gloves, knives, pins,
and a bonnet, basically like the things you would need
to set up house uh and sort of start your
life in a new place. On average, though the majority
(09:27):
of the women who went from France to the Americas
as part of this program were from modest homes, a
handful were widows who were looking for a new life
after losing their husbands. Many of them were from Paris
or Rouens or the surrounding areas, but they could come
from anywhere in France, and several of them were not
even of French birth. And some of the benefit of
(09:50):
recruiting women from charity hospitals, which in this case we
should mention that it's hospital isn't really what we think
of that word meaning today. It's much more like and instant.
You shoon are kind of like a poorhouse in some cases,
or from very tough lives in the city streets. Was
really that these young women were accustomed to the idea
of having to work, and that was a high value
(10:10):
in introducing them into a Newish settlement. At one point, however,
Jean Tellen wrote to Jean Baptiste Colbert that it would
really be best if they would send a few more
farm girls and fewer city orphans, because the latter group
are sometimes too sickly to take on the challenges that
awaited them in the Canadian wilderness. His letter states, it
would be good to recommend strongly that those who are
(10:33):
destined for this country are in no way disgraced in nature,
that they are not repulsive on the exterior, and that
they are healthy and strong for farm work or at
least have some ability for handiwork. Yeah, he wanted some
you know, hearty gals. Uh. And roughly two thirds of
the women making their way to New France married to
(10:53):
men who were living in the more rural areas of
the colony rather than the urban base. So there really
was some ledge to make concerned that women unsuited to
country life are really going to have a rough time
of it. And since the goal of this entire program
was to bolster the population and expand the settlement, it
made sense to everyone involved to try to stack the
odds in favor of making genuinely suitable matches. And you know,
(11:16):
landing women in positions that they were going to be
comfortable in, that they could handle, that they would be
able to, you know, help provide for their family in
the community. To that end, there was also a handful
of women we mentioned earlier of slightly higher social standing.
These women were in the mix with the intent that
they would be potential bribes for military officers and citizens
(11:37):
of high estate within the settlements social structure. So reading
through these details, it starts to feel like something of
a hybrid between super efficient matchmaking and livestock wrangling. Yeah,
it's uh, it's one of those things where it's easy
to get real bristoly and be like, wait, they were
doing what, like, it's kind of like mail order bribing
on a really huge scale. Uh. And while the exact
(12:01):
number of women that that were part of this whole
initiative is a little tricky to pin down, some of
the women that were involved are debated by historians as
to whether they were actually part of the King's daughter's
initiative or if they just kind of made their way
on their own and tried to kind of blend in
with the King's Daughter's program. Others are kind of problematic
to match the numbers up because the redor the records
(12:24):
are either incomplete, or they're muddled, or some part of
the record has been damaged. But it is estimated that
seven hundred and seventy women were sent to New France
over the course of a decade as the King's daughters,
and this made up about eight percent of the total
immigrants to New France during that period. And that sounds
like a very low number because it's a single digit.
But if that sounds scant to you, it's worth noting
(12:46):
that it also made up about fifty of all the
women that we're going to New France during these years.
Most of the people that were headed to New France
from France were in fact men who wanted to get
in on the fur trade and try to make their fortune.
Only one in ten of these women had a relation,
even a very distant relation, anywhere else in the colony
(13:08):
when they traveled from France. This is a huge contrast
to the rest of the women who made the same
journey before seventeen hundred. For women who were not one
of the King's daughters, roughly two thirds of them had
at least one relation in New France, and most of
them had more than one relation. You know, they were
either going to family that they knew or uh, you know,
(13:31):
they had multiple cousins there, something to that effect. And
in terms of the age breakdown, about fourteen percent of
these women were between the ages of fourteen and eighteen,
forty four percent were between the ages of nineteen and
twenty four, twenty five percent were between ages of twenty
five to twenty nine, twelve percent were thirty to thirty four,
(13:51):
three percent were thirty five to thirty nine, and a
little under two percent were older than forty or forty
year older. And as you track the to upward from
the youngest to oldest, the percentage of widows in each group,
unsurprisingly also goes up. There have been some accounts through
the years that most of the women in the program
(14:12):
were of less than pristine virtue, and there's been an
equal degree of historical testimony that this was not the
case at all. Some accounts indicate that before any woman
was allowed to get on a ship bound for New France,
a friend a relative had to vouch for their virtuous
and good nature beforehand. Ill behavior or debauchery on the
way could result in a woman being shipped directly back
(14:34):
to France, with her opportunity to start a new life
in the colony completely avoided. Uh. And before we get
onto sort of how these matches were made on a
more nuts and bolts sort of level. Uh, And sort
of how incentivized family making was. Do you want to
do another quick word from a sponsor. Let's do as
(15:02):
you might imagine in a colony that consisted almost entirely
of men, brides shipped from the homeland were quite an
exciting prospect, and most of the women that came from
France to North America were married in pretty short order
after arriving in New France. To further incentivize this whole
idea of making a population stronghold, the French government also
(15:25):
offered cash grants to men who were married, and even
larger sums to men who had children with their new wives.
Allowances were made and tables were drawn up to accommodate
families as large as twelve, and they were corresponding payment
levels for all sizes. Families had a very clear cash value. Yeah,
it gives the term family values a whole different meaning
(15:48):
if you think about it in this way. Uh. Men
who opted not to take a wife, however, actually found
themselves penalized. Uh. Their fur trading efforts would meet up
with blocks, and their privileges were regulated to the point
of loss, like they would not be legally allowed to
trade or there, you know trade. Uh allowances were suspended
after a very you know, short amount. But men did not,
(16:10):
I feel compelled to point out, need to marry any
of the fee douir to benefit from these incentive programs.
They could also marry natives of North America, people's already
living there, people that came from other places. Just as
long as they were in the French colony marrying and
making families, they could still get benefit payments as long
as they were kind of helping populate the French colony.
(16:33):
So to modern ears, this may seem like a pretty
weird scheme that was destined for failure. But it turned
out that all of this incentivized family building actually worked
exactly as the king had hoped. All but about four
percent of the field doui were married in New France. Yeah,
this was a huge success, which I will admit that
(16:56):
through my modern lens and I try and you know,
to put that stuff aside. But there's just part of me,
that's always like, no way with this work. Oh yeah,
it worked really well. Actually yeah. I on the other
hand him like, I'd sign up for that. If I
have a choice between you know, being destitute, uh or
traveling an ocean and having a new adventure, I might
(17:17):
travel the ocean and have a new adventure. Yeah. And
we'll talk about this some more in just a moment,
But part of the success of this really does have
to be attributed to Colbert's recruitment efforts and his close
work with Teman to select the right assortment of ladies
for the Canadian colony. So when Tracy mentioned earlier that
this was sort of like really efficient matchmaking combined with
(17:38):
sort of like a livestock situation, it really was. They
were quite good at picking exactly the right numbers and
the right matches for these men in the colonies. Uh.
And many of these women had come from situations that
were extremely difficult for them, either due to deaths in
the family that sort of left them without anyone uh
there in New France, or just general miss fortune. So
(18:01):
there was usually some degree of motivation to truly make
an effort to make this new life work, and for
some women it was a rare opportunity at freedom. They
you know, either maybe had gotten into some trouble while
they were in France. Usually it wasn't terrible trouble if
they were allowed to be one of the king's daughters.
But basically, you know, at this point, the colonies were
still sort of considered this sort of backwards scary thing.
(18:24):
But when you're facing you know, definite destitution where you
live versus, as Tracy said, like a new adventure and
a potential to actually have a life with some social mobility,
they were willing to take the risk. So, especially compared
to life in like a charity hospital or another institution,
this looked like a way more appealing option. The setup
(18:45):
also gave women way more choice when it came to
picking a spouse than they probably would have had at
home in France. In the case of women who were
from more affluent families, their parents probably would have been
the ones making the decision for them, and in the
case of women who were from more impoverished circumstances, it
opened up the possibility of a marriage and a related
(19:07):
increase in social standing. And that's an opportunity that they
would not have had if they had stayed in Europe,
and there are some written accounts that described this whole
thing as like a meat market scenario, where the male
settlers would just come in and sort of assess and
select brides like livestock. But there are a lot of
other accounts that really contradict that and they make it
(19:28):
sound much more civilized. So in these versions, men that
were considering taking a wife would visit the king's daughters
under supervised conditions. So remember most of these ladies stayed
at a convent when they arrived in North America, or
they were placed with families of church members that they
weren't sort of just pushed into a room and then
o gold by men. They had basically gentlemen callers that
(19:51):
would come and meet them, and the ladies could interact
with these potential suitors if they wished. They didn't have
to interact with them, and they had the right to
refuse ridge proposals if they were not interested in the
man who was interested in them, So they were not
being paraded up onto a stage to be selected from
like in our trains episode. Right, there was also a
(20:12):
lot more personal freedom than a lot of women were
entitled to anywhere else. In the world in the late
sixteen hundreds. But once a woman actually did get married,
her husband was considered to be her master and the
final word in the household. Yeah, even though getting them
to the married state was really a much more uh
(20:33):
you know, empowered state for them to be in in
terms of their choice, once they got married, it was
pretty old school and the husband ran the house and
they kind of had to bend to his will. Although
it does seem like most of these matches were pretty good,
most many of them lasted decades, lots of kids. Uh.
Just ten years after France began systematically shipping these brides
(20:55):
to be to New France, the population in a French
settlement had tripled by virtue of both immigration and procreation.
So in addition to the fijuoi sort of going over
and that's less than a thousand. But then they started
having children very quickly, and this also just helped make
the colony look like a more appealing place for other
people to go to. So it kind of helped in
(21:17):
a pr way as well. And of all of these
marriages that happened, so we mentioned, there was only like
a four percent unsuccessful match rates. Only four percent of
the women didn't get married. Only three percent of all
of those successful marriages didn't result in children, and sometimes
those were like usually medical issues or uh, some other
(21:37):
problem that came up, one of the spouses would die, etcetera.
Within twenty years of the first births to come from
these marriages, the population split between women and men was
close to equal. So those are some pretty significant strides,
I mean, I think in terms of data set, if
you looked at it from when uh, King Louis concocted
(21:57):
this plan with his advisers and you know, just twenty
years later, they had really kind of achieved most of
what they set out to do. However, in sixteen seventy three,
after a decade of doing this, as France became embroiled
in conflict with Holland, uh, the King's Daughter's program was
actually deemed too costly to maintain because remember they're still
paying for these women to to travel to have their
(22:20):
trousseau set up there. You know, at that point, paying
the men incentives to have children that got very expensive.
They couldn't do that while they were also paying for
their military efforts. It's also worth noting that France was
not the only country using efforts like this to bolster
the population of a colony, although most other countries programs
(22:40):
were a lot more modest. Today it said that almost
any French Canadian is related to at least one of
the King's daughters, and many people that get into genealogy
are able to connect their family lines to multiple kings daughters, uh,
where they can sort of find many of the several
of them on the branches of their family tree. And
if you can trace your genes to a dui, you
(23:00):
can actually be certified as a descendant of the King's daughters,
so that you will have your own sort of magical
connection to this piece of French history. Uh. And there
are places still doing the certification online. There was one
big one that was happening a push in as part
of an anniversary celebration of this whole event. But I
think they are still doing the certifications. But that is
(23:22):
the story of the fiduuix, the import of brides to
North America and New France in an effort to sort
of make a population, and it was super successful, as
much as part of me has a hard time accepting
that it was very successful. Yeah, I think I'm actually
in the context of this story. The thing that's the
bigger sticking point for me is the greater context of
(23:45):
what was happening in the America's with colonialization rather than
this select group of women, because especially in the context
of the times, it does seem like they had a
lot more agency and choice, yeah than in France. Yeah.
It's one of those weird things where part of it
is that admittedly this is through my lens of kind
of like the romantic of like, no, you find your
(24:07):
true love, which is silly, Uh, that it's hard to
think like, oh, so these you know, government guys went
out and they found women and thought like, oh, this
is these numbers are going to match up pretty well,
and it worked. I'm like, where is the true love
in that? But that's ridiculous and not to be applied.
You can think about it as that, Uh, with that
(24:27):
disparity and the people who were seeking partners, it was
a lot more likely that ladies would find somebody they
were genuinely attracted to because they had a much bigger's
choose from with less competition. That's true, And as I said,
many of these marriages lasted decades and we're you know,
very seemingly on paper at least successful. Uh. You know,
(24:48):
they had many children, they supported their farms or their
fur trade, and they, like I said, they laid the
genetic groundwork really for French Canada. So uh success. Thank
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
(25:09):
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since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
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(25:30):
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Hey everybody, and Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we're
going to have an installment in our six impossible episode series,
and one of those impossible episodes that we mentioned throws
back to Le fi Droix, which was the French effort
to send eligible women to New France to correct a
gender imbalance that had developed there. This is the oldest
episode that's getting a shout out in the one that's
(00:23):
coming out this week, or at least in terms of
ones that have not already been reissued as Saturday Classics,
so we thought it would be a good time to
re release it for listeners who weren't tuned into the
show back in July, or could use a refresher on
this bit of Canadian history. And please pardon my terrible
pronunciation of French and sometimes also English in this episode.
(00:48):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today's
topic is one that we have had many requests for,
especially since I mentioned when we were doing our Maurice
(01:11):
Duplace episodes that I wanted to do more Canadian history
and It's also one that's actually been on my list
for quite a while, but I will not tell a lie.
The thing that tipped the balance and kind of shifted
this way up was a request from one of our
youngest fans, Zell and her dad Tony, who wrote as
a very charming email, so bone that you made. Uh. So,
(01:33):
this one is going to be about French Canadian history
and the colonization of New France. And while the building
of a population in a new colony seems like a
rather tricky endeavor and it is, uh, Francis, King Louis
the fourteenth launched this scheme to do just that by
shipping eligible ladies to do France in the sixteen hundreds
so they could be brides and helped build out this population.
(01:55):
And how did this play out? You may or may
not be surprised, but we will tell you all about
its earning now. So, after Europe became aware of these
giant new continents new to their minds, the Americas, all
of that land became contentiously battled over by all the
various European power players. Spain and Portugal struggled with one another,
(02:15):
primarily to rest control of South America, while North America
became a battleground for France and England, and in sixteen
o eight Samuel de Champlain built the first domicile in Quebec,
and consequently he's sometimes referred to as the founder of
New France. And this, of course, we're giving you very
broad strokes. It's an oversimplified version of the story. But
(02:37):
I mostly just wanted to establish the official founding of
this settlement in the early sixteen hundreds. In those early years,
the primary industry of New France was the fur trade.
For the fifty five years after de cha Plan founded
the settlement, it was run by commercial companies. The Canadian
colony was primarily run by the Compagnie de Santas Socier,
(02:58):
which had honest to develop the North American French territory
in exchange for rights to the land resources. And so
what started primarily as a group of fur trappers and
traders did indeed grow, and soon there were dock workers
to handle the incoming and outgoing shipments of fur. There
were shopkeepers because they had to have some form of
(03:19):
commerce that was supporting all of these people. Uh, and
there were other workmen that came to New France. But
really it was all about supporting the fur trade, uh
and most of these were men that were on their
own or who had left their families behind. So bringing
women and children across the Atlantic to a new territory
that was still covered in wilderness wasn't generally thought of
(03:40):
as profitable by the men who were settling New France.
Adding more mouths to feed, and these were mouths that
wouldn't be able to contribute to the bottom line of
the fur trade really seemed like a losing proposition on paper.
From the standpoint of a for profit business looking to
stay profitable, this was of course the wisest course of
action to you know, leave behind the women and children.
(04:01):
But from the point of view of a country that
was actually looking to colonize the land that it had
claimed abroad, this became a huge problem. After fifty five
years of letting the company to Santa Associate run the
settlement effort, less than one percent of the land that
France had claimed was actually occupied by Europeans. There were
(04:21):
a mere three thousand settlers in New France, and by comparison,
British colonists numbered in the low six figures. There were
more than thirty times as many of them as there
were French colonists. So we've talked many times before about
the lengthy and contentious history between Britain and France before
this vast gap in colonial development was kind of an
(04:44):
embarrassment for France's part, and seeing how poorly the corporate
settlers had managed things in terms of population growth, uh,
and how the national pride had kind of been tanked
by it. King Louis the fort teenths and the other
leaders in France made a move to rectify the situation,
(05:05):
so New France was then placed under the rule of
the monarchy. The Sun King was extremely keene on incentivizing colonization.
He really really wanted to have an established, truly settled
French presence in North America, and what he needed to
make that goal was families. Yeah, we're not going to
(05:27):
diverge a bunch about Louis the fourteenth and the Sun
King's legacy, but he really there was some pretty explosive
colonization growth for France all over the world under his rule,
So this was something he obviously was really invested in
and cared about. And since the men who had been
working the fur trade were largely single, as we mentioned,
and there were few ladies in New France that were
(05:48):
actually eligible for courtship. The king, along with the Intendant
of Quebec, Jean Talon, and the King's Minister of Finance,
Jean Baptiste Colbert. I'd have no idea if he's related
to Stephen Colbert, so can't help you there. If that
just popped your mind. Uh. These three men concocted this
plan to fill the gap in the sexes and even
out the numbers. Uh. And so when this initiative that
(06:11):
they came up with was started in sixteen sixty three,
there were six men for every woman in New France,
and some most of those women were already uh betrothed
or married to men already, so they were not available women.
From sixteen sixty three to sixteen seventy three, a program
was sent into motion, and this sent marriageable ladies, who
(06:31):
came to be known as le fi DUIs or the
King's daughters, to New France to become brides, mothers, and
really the backbone of the settlement in many ways. Colbert
arranged the recruitment and bon voyages of the women from France,
and Tolon made sure that they were taken care of
when they reached North America. As part of this field,
(06:51):
the French monarchy paid for the transit of these young
women as a government expense, and the French West India
Company handled their transport and was paid quite handsomely for
each each woman that it transported. Yeah, they were basically
considered very very important cargo because the King really really
wanted this whole thing to be successful. And while there
(07:13):
had been women who traveled to Canada certainly prior to
this initiative to make their way and hopefully find husbands,
those women traveled on their own dime. It was not
part of this sort of government sanctioned effort. UH sixteen
sixty three really marks the beginning of subsidized import of
potential brides from France. The term via dou wos was
(07:34):
first coined by Marguerite Bourgoi, who founded the Congregation of
Notre Dame in Montreal in the sixteen fifties. Her convent
was normally the place where these young women would be
welcomed once they arrived in New France, and the convent
would care for them during the transition, and was characterized
as part of helping with France's very important colonization mission. Yeah,
(07:57):
they took this responsibility very very seriously. Uh. And before
we talk about who these young women really were, do
you want to have a quick word from a sponsor.
Sure thing. So, getting back to the fie doui, the
(08:18):
backgrounds of these ladies who set out for the Americas
as part of this program were actually pretty diverse. There
have been times where you'll see in sort of the
quick and dirty history accounts of them like, oh they
were all you know of low birth. Oh no, they
were all genteel ladies. But really it really was pretty diverse.
Some were from fairly well off families, not a lot uh.
(08:41):
And these women would travel with their bridal trousseau sort
of ready to start their own families with the men
they would meet in the colony. Others had been recruited
from country areas. Some were in fact orphans from the
streets of Paris. And in the case of the very
poor daughters of France, the state provided an assortment of
useful household goods as their trousseau and also allotted each
woman a small dowry. And these sort of state uh
(09:05):
provided trousseau normally included like a ladies valise or some
sort of case for carrying a handkerchief, ribbons, a supply
of needles and white thread, scissors, a hairbrush, stockings, gloves, knives, pins,
and a bonnet, basically like the things you would need
to set up house uh and sort of start your
life in a new place. On average, though the majority
(09:27):
of the women who went from France to the Americas
as part of this program were from modest homes, a
handful were widows who were looking for a new life
after losing their husbands. Many of them were from Paris
or Rouens or the surrounding areas, but they could come
from anywhere in France, and several of them were not
even of French birth. And some of the benefit of
(09:50):
recruiting women from charity hospitals, which in this case we
should mention that it's hospital isn't really what we think
of that word meaning today. It's much more like and instant.
You shoon are kind of like a poorhouse in some cases,
or from very tough lives in the city streets. Was
really that these young women were accustomed to the idea
of having to work, and that was a high value
(10:10):
in introducing them into a Newish settlement. At one point, however,
Jean Tellen wrote to Jean Baptiste Colbert that it would
really be best if they would send a few more
farm girls and fewer city orphans, because the latter group
are sometimes too sickly to take on the challenges that
awaited them in the Canadian wilderness. His letter states, it
would be good to recommend strongly that those who are
(10:33):
destined for this country are in no way disgraced in nature,
that they are not repulsive on the exterior, and that
they are healthy and strong for farm work or at
least have some ability for handiwork. Yeah, he wanted some
you know, hearty gals. Uh. And roughly two thirds of
the women making their way to New France married to
(10:53):
men who were living in the more rural areas of
the colony rather than the urban base. So there really
was some ledge to make concerned that women unsuited to
country life are really going to have a rough time
of it. And since the goal of this entire program
was to bolster the population and expand the settlement, it
made sense to everyone involved to try to stack the
odds in favor of making genuinely suitable matches. And you know,
(11:16):
landing women in positions that they were going to be
comfortable in, that they could handle, that they would be
able to, you know, help provide for their family in
the community. To that end, there was also a handful
of women we mentioned earlier of slightly higher social standing.
These women were in the mix with the intent that
they would be potential bribes for military officers and citizens
(11:37):
of high estate within the settlements social structure. So reading
through these details, it starts to feel like something of
a hybrid between super efficient matchmaking and livestock wrangling. Yeah,
it's uh, it's one of those things where it's easy
to get real bristoly and be like, wait, they were
doing what, like, it's kind of like mail order bribing
on a really huge scale. Uh. And while the exact
(12:01):
number of women that that were part of this whole
initiative is a little tricky to pin down, some of
the women that were involved are debated by historians as
to whether they were actually part of the King's daughter's
initiative or if they just kind of made their way
on their own and tried to kind of blend in
with the King's Daughter's program. Others are kind of problematic
to match the numbers up because the redor the records
(12:24):
are either incomplete, or they're muddled, or some part of
the record has been damaged. But it is estimated that
seven hundred and seventy women were sent to New France
over the course of a decade as the King's daughters,
and this made up about eight percent of the total
immigrants to New France during that period. And that sounds
like a very low number because it's a single digit.
But if that sounds scant to you, it's worth noting
(12:46):
that it also made up about fifty of all the
women that we're going to New France during these years.
Most of the people that were headed to New France
from France were in fact men who wanted to get
in on the fur trade and try to make their fortune.
Only one in ten of these women had a relation,
even a very distant relation, anywhere else in the colony
(13:08):
when they traveled from France. This is a huge contrast
to the rest of the women who made the same
journey before seventeen hundred. For women who were not one
of the King's daughters, roughly two thirds of them had
at least one relation in New France, and most of
them had more than one relation. You know, they were
either going to family that they knew or uh, you know,
(13:31):
they had multiple cousins there, something to that effect. And
in terms of the age breakdown, about fourteen percent of
these women were between the ages of fourteen and eighteen,
forty four percent were between the ages of nineteen and
twenty four, twenty five percent were between ages of twenty
five to twenty nine, twelve percent were thirty to thirty four,
(13:51):
three percent were thirty five to thirty nine, and a
little under two percent were older than forty or forty
year older. And as you track the to upward from
the youngest to oldest, the percentage of widows in each group,
unsurprisingly also goes up. There have been some accounts through
the years that most of the women in the program
(14:12):
were of less than pristine virtue, and there's been an
equal degree of historical testimony that this was not the
case at all. Some accounts indicate that before any woman
was allowed to get on a ship bound for New France,
a friend a relative had to vouch for their virtuous
and good nature beforehand. Ill behavior or debauchery on the
way could result in a woman being shipped directly back
(14:34):
to France, with her opportunity to start a new life
in the colony completely avoided. Uh. And before we get
onto sort of how these matches were made on a
more nuts and bolts sort of level. Uh, And sort
of how incentivized family making was. Do you want to
do another quick word from a sponsor. Let's do as
(15:02):
you might imagine in a colony that consisted almost entirely
of men, brides shipped from the homeland were quite an
exciting prospect, and most of the women that came from
France to North America were married in pretty short order
after arriving in New France. To further incentivize this whole
idea of making a population stronghold, the French government also
(15:25):
offered cash grants to men who were married, and even
larger sums to men who had children with their new wives.
Allowances were made and tables were drawn up to accommodate
families as large as twelve, and they were corresponding payment
levels for all sizes. Families had a very clear cash value. Yeah,
it gives the term family values a whole different meaning
(15:48):
if you think about it in this way. Uh. Men
who opted not to take a wife, however, actually found
themselves penalized. Uh. Their fur trading efforts would meet up
with blocks, and their privileges were regulated to the point
of loss, like they would not be legally allowed to
trade or there, you know trade. Uh allowances were suspended
after a very you know, short amount. But men did not,
(16:10):
I feel compelled to point out, need to marry any
of the fee douir to benefit from these incentive programs.
They could also marry natives of North America, people's already
living there, people that came from other places. Just as
long as they were in the French colony marrying and
making families, they could still get benefit payments as long
as they were kind of helping populate the French colony.
(16:33):
So to modern ears, this may seem like a pretty
weird scheme that was destined for failure. But it turned
out that all of this incentivized family building actually worked
exactly as the king had hoped. All but about four
percent of the field doui were married in New France. Yeah,
this was a huge success, which I will admit that
(16:56):
through my modern lens and I try and you know,
to put that stuff aside. But there's just part of me,
that's always like, no way with this work. Oh yeah,
it worked really well. Actually yeah. I on the other
hand him like, I'd sign up for that. If I
have a choice between you know, being destitute, uh or
traveling an ocean and having a new adventure, I might
(17:17):
travel the ocean and have a new adventure. Yeah. And
we'll talk about this some more in just a moment,
But part of the success of this really does have
to be attributed to Colbert's recruitment efforts and his close
work with Teman to select the right assortment of ladies
for the Canadian colony. So when Tracy mentioned earlier that
this was sort of like really efficient matchmaking combined with
(17:38):
sort of like a livestock situation, it really was. They
were quite good at picking exactly the right numbers and
the right matches for these men in the colonies. Uh.
And many of these women had come from situations that
were extremely difficult for them, either due to deaths in
the family that sort of left them without anyone uh
there in New France, or just general miss fortune. So
(18:01):
there was usually some degree of motivation to truly make
an effort to make this new life work, and for
some women it was a rare opportunity at freedom. They
you know, either maybe had gotten into some trouble while
they were in France. Usually it wasn't terrible trouble if
they were allowed to be one of the king's daughters.
But basically, you know, at this point, the colonies were
still sort of considered this sort of backwards scary thing.
(18:24):
But when you're facing you know, definite destitution where you
live versus, as Tracy said, like a new adventure and
a potential to actually have a life with some social mobility,
they were willing to take the risk. So, especially compared
to life in like a charity hospital or another institution,
this looked like a way more appealing option. The setup
(18:45):
also gave women way more choice when it came to
picking a spouse than they probably would have had at
home in France. In the case of women who were
from more affluent families, their parents probably would have been
the ones making the decision for them, and in the
case of women who were from more impoverished circumstances, it
opened up the possibility of a marriage and a related
(19:07):
increase in social standing. And that's an opportunity that they
would not have had if they had stayed in Europe,
and there are some written accounts that described this whole
thing as like a meat market scenario, where the male
settlers would just come in and sort of assess and
select brides like livestock. But there are a lot of
other accounts that really contradict that and they make it
(19:28):
sound much more civilized. So in these versions, men that
were considering taking a wife would visit the king's daughters
under supervised conditions. So remember most of these ladies stayed
at a convent when they arrived in North America, or
they were placed with families of church members that they
weren't sort of just pushed into a room and then
o gold by men. They had basically gentlemen callers that
(19:51):
would come and meet them, and the ladies could interact
with these potential suitors if they wished. They didn't have
to interact with them, and they had the right to
refuse ridge proposals if they were not interested in the
man who was interested in them, So they were not
being paraded up onto a stage to be selected from
like in our trains episode. Right, there was also a
(20:12):
lot more personal freedom than a lot of women were
entitled to anywhere else. In the world in the late
sixteen hundreds. But once a woman actually did get married,
her husband was considered to be her master and the
final word in the household. Yeah, even though getting them
to the married state was really a much more uh
(20:33):
you know, empowered state for them to be in in
terms of their choice, once they got married, it was
pretty old school and the husband ran the house and
they kind of had to bend to his will. Although
it does seem like most of these matches were pretty good,
most many of them lasted decades, lots of kids. Uh.
Just ten years after France began systematically shipping these brides
(20:55):
to be to New France, the population in a French
settlement had tripled by virtue of both immigration and procreation.
So in addition to the fijuoi sort of going over
and that's less than a thousand. But then they started
having children very quickly, and this also just helped make
the colony look like a more appealing place for other
people to go to. So it kind of helped in
(21:17):
a pr way as well. And of all of these
marriages that happened, so we mentioned, there was only like
a four percent unsuccessful match rates. Only four percent of
the women didn't get married. Only three percent of all
of those successful marriages didn't result in children, and sometimes
those were like usually medical issues or uh, some other
(21:37):
problem that came up, one of the spouses would die, etcetera.
Within twenty years of the first births to come from
these marriages, the population split between women and men was
close to equal. So those are some pretty significant strides,
I mean, I think in terms of data set, if
you looked at it from when uh, King Louis concocted
(21:57):
this plan with his advisers and you know, just twenty
years later, they had really kind of achieved most of
what they set out to do. However, in sixteen seventy three,
after a decade of doing this, as France became embroiled
in conflict with Holland, uh, the King's Daughter's program was
actually deemed too costly to maintain because remember they're still
paying for these women to to travel to have their
(22:20):
trousseau set up there. You know, at that point, paying
the men incentives to have children that got very expensive.
They couldn't do that while they were also paying for
their military efforts. It's also worth noting that France was
not the only country using efforts like this to bolster
the population of a colony, although most other countries programs
(22:40):
were a lot more modest. Today it said that almost
any French Canadian is related to at least one of
the King's daughters, and many people that get into genealogy
are able to connect their family lines to multiple kings daughters, uh,
where they can sort of find many of the several
of them on the branches of their family tree. And
if you can trace your genes to a dui, you
(23:00):
can actually be certified as a descendant of the King's daughters,
so that you will have your own sort of magical
connection to this piece of French history. Uh. And there
are places still doing the certification online. There was one
big one that was happening a push in as part
of an anniversary celebration of this whole event. But I
think they are still doing the certifications. But that is
(23:22):
the story of the fiduuix, the import of brides to
North America and New France in an effort to sort
of make a population, and it was super successful, as
much as part of me has a hard time accepting
that it was very successful. Yeah, I think I'm actually
in the context of this story. The thing that's the
bigger sticking point for me is the greater context of
(23:45):
what was happening in the America's with colonialization rather than
this select group of women, because especially in the context
of the times, it does seem like they had a
lot more agency and choice, yeah than in France. Yeah.
It's one of those weird things where part of it
is that admittedly this is through my lens of kind
of like the romantic of like, no, you find your
(24:07):
true love, which is silly, Uh, that it's hard to
think like, oh, so these you know, government guys went
out and they found women and thought like, oh, this
is these numbers are going to match up pretty well,
and it worked. I'm like, where is the true love
in that? But that's ridiculous and not to be applied.
You can think about it as that, Uh, with that
(24:27):
disparity and the people who were seeking partners, it was
a lot more likely that ladies would find somebody they
were genuinely attracted to because they had a much bigger's
choose from with less competition. That's true, And as I said,
many of these marriages lasted decades and we're you know,
very seemingly on paper at least successful. Uh. You know,
(24:48):
they had many children, they supported their farms or their
fur trade, and they, like I said, they laid the
genetic groundwork really for French Canada. So uh success. Thank
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
(25:09):
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
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(25:30):
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