King's Daughters
The program was designed to boost New France's population both by encouraging Frenchmen to move to the New World, and by promoting marriage, family formation, and the birth of French children in the colony.
The small number of female immigrants had to pay their own passage, and few single women wanted to leave home to move and settle in the harsh climate and conditions of New France.
At the same time, officials noted the population growth of the competing English colonies, which had more families, and they worried about France's ability to maintain its territorial claims in the New World.
[3] To increase the French population and the number of families, the Intendant of New France, Jean Talon, proposed that the king sponsor passage of at least 500 women.
[6] Research by the historical demographer Yves Landry determines that there were in total about 770 to 850 filles du roi[7] who settled in New France between 1663 and 1673.
[8] The title "King's Daughters" was meant to imply state patronage, not royal or noble parentage; most of the women recruited were commoners of humble birth.
[10] Those chosen to be among the filles du roi and allowed to emigrate to New France were held to scrupulous standards, which were based on their "moral calibre" and whether they were physically fit enough to survive the hard work demanded by life as a colonist.
[26] A substantial number of the filles du roi who arrived in New France between 1669 and 1671 cancelled marriage contracts; perhaps the dowry they had received made them disinclined to retain a fiancé with whom they found themselves dissatisfied.
As Saint Marie de L'Incarnation wrote, the filles du roi were mostly town girls, and only a few knew how to do manual farm work.
Prior to the King's Daughters, the women who immigrated to Ville-Marie, otherwise known as Montreal, had been recruited by the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal founded in 1641 in Paris.
[19] The migration briefly resumed in 1673, when the king sent 60 more girls at the request of Buade de Frontenac, the new governor, but that was the last under the Crown's sponsorship.
[34] The popularization of the idea that the filles du roi in particular were prostitutes can be traced to an account by the Baron de Lahontan of his time in New France;[35] several earlier sources made the same assertion, including Saint-Amant, Tallement des Réaux, and Paul LeJeune.
In his account, Lahontan refers to the filles du roi as being "of middling virtue", and wrote that they had emigrated in the hopes of religious absolution.
[36] As early as 1738, Claude Le Beau countered his portrayal in an account of his own journey to New France, as did Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix in his 1744 work.
[38] The ships carrying the filles du roi would travel up the Saint Lawrence River, stopping first at Quebec City, then at Trois-Rivières, and lastly at Montreal.
