Filles du Roy

alternative King's Daughters · alternative Filles du Roi

1. A non-religious program composed of orphaned girls of France shipped to New France to populate French North America with Frenchmen, by providing wives to the bachelor colonial French traders.

   The Filles du roy were sent out from France to assure that the men would stay on the land.

   1981 Spring-Summer, Louise H. Forsyth, “The radical transformation of the mother-daughter relationship in some women writers of Quebec”, in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, volume 6, number 1/2

   3 more examples

   Considered from our own historical vantage-point, the lot of the Filles du Roy certainly seems to have been less than enviable.

   1971, The cultural tradition of Canadian women: the historical background

   According to him, the role of women as mothers, particularly as a result of the "Filles du Roy" influx in the late 1660s and of exogamous marriages, provides the main explanation for the phenomenon.

   1991, The Canadian Modern Language Review - Volume 48, page 349

   This rereading of history involves few male characters; Marie Rollet (wife of Louis Hébert and, with him, founder of the first French family in New France), the "Filles du Roy" (young women, mostly poor or orphaned, sent by the king of France by boatloads to marry the settlers in the new colony), the chambermaids who worked for the wealthy families of the Grande-Allée — in other words, the mothers and daughters of the past — are at the forefront of Flora's quest.

   2001, Janis L. Pallister, The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert: Essays on Her Works, →ISBN, page 92