The Forgotten Destiny of the King’s Daughters Sent by Louis XIV to Quebec

PART 2:

  To populate the population, women were needed who were capable of giving birth and who were capable of surviving.  to the harshness of Canada. So, we inspected, we checked the age, ideally between 16 and 30 years old.  We looked at health, the solidity of the body, sometimes even the teeth.  Those who were sick, too frail, or who seemed incapable of running a household or bearing children were excluded.

  Imagine what that means.  To be examined, gauged, evaluated, not for who you are, but for what your body can produce.  We don’t ask you who you love, or what you dream about.  We are only asking one thing of you.  Are you strong?  Behind the words “gift from the king” lay a much harsher truth.  In the eyes of the state, these women were a demographic investment.

Breeding cattle, to be frank. And yet, remember this well, it is precisely these ruthless criteria that will later save the lives of many of them.  We’ll come back to that. So, what exactly was this famous gift ?  Because that’s where the golden legend was created. The king paid for everything: recruitment, travel, crossing, and installation.

  And some received a dowry, often 50 pounds, sometimes in money, sometimes in goods, clothes, linen, a pair of scissors, needles, a comb, some coins, fifty pounds.  This might have seemed like a fortune to an orphan who had never owned anything in her life. But put together, it was little more than a modest starter kit.

We were very far from the royal treasure that legend imagines.  The real gift, in truth, was not the money, it was the promise.  The promise of a husband, a land, a name, an existence finally recognized.  For a woman born into nothingness, it was perhaps the only wealth that truly mattered.  So, they said yes.

  They signed or drew a cross.  because many did not know how to write and they headed towards the port, towards what they [music] believed to be the beginning of a better life.  She didn’t yet know what awaited them on the water. Finally comes the day of departure, usually from an Atlantic port, Diep or La Rochelle, imagine the scene, you are holding your small trunk tightly against you.

In front, a forest of maize that scratched the sky, the smell of salt, tar, and rotten fish.  sailors who create orders and this wooden ship that will become your whole world for two, sometimes three months.  You will probably never come back .  [music] You know it.  Every face in the crowd, every rooftop, every steeple in France, you look at it for the last time.

You etch these images into your memory because that’s all you’ll have left .  And then the footbridge, the bridge that sways beneath your feet, the ribs that shrink and then disappear.  There is nothing left but water.  Water as far as the eye can see in all directions.  This is where the real test begins.

  Because what they never tell you in good stories is what happens once the hold doors are closed.  A 17th-century ship has no impactful beauty.  It is an overcrowded, dark, damp wooden hull that creaks and groans with every wave as if it were about to break apart.  You sleep crammed together in the steerage, without air, without daylight.

  The rolling never stops, neither day nor night.  Most women become ill within the first few days.  Seasickness doubles them over for weeks on end, and that’s just the beginning.  The fresh water stagnates in the barrels and takes on a muddy taste.  The biscuits harden and then fill with glass.  The salted meat spoils and in this stifling promiscuity, vermin proliferate.

  Lice, fleas, rat-eaters in the dark.  Then comes the silent enemy, the most dreaded of sailors, scurvy.  Without fresh fruit, the genenscives swell and turn black. Teeth become loose, old wounds reopen on their own.  The fatigue becomes so overwhelming that one can no longer get up. On these crossings, it was not uncommon for passengers to die at sea, their necks wrapped in sheets and thrown overboard with only a prayer swallowed by the wind as a ceremony.

  Imagine that you are there, sick, dirty, terrified, tossed about in the dark for weeks without knowing if you will ever see the earth again.  And yet, somewhere deep inside you, a small idea keeps you going.  On the other [music] side of this hell, a new life awaits you.  But this new life, too, was going to hold a shock for you. After endless weeks, a cry finally rang out from the top of the earth.

  Everything is rushing onto the bridge.  The St. Lawrence River opens up before you, immense, bordered by endless dark forests, larger than anything you have ever seen.  Then Quebec appears, clinging to its rock. A few houses of wood and stone, a church, a fort.  This is the great city of the new world.  This is your new life.

  When you finally set foot on the quay, legs trembling, exhausted, stomach still knotted by the sea, you discover another shock: the stares. Because on these shores, the news has already spread like wildfire.  Entire boatloads of women arrive and dozens of solitary men, settlers, demobilized soldiers, coureurs des bois, wait with their eyes fixed on you.

  You haven’t even gotten off the train yet and you’re already being assessed.  What follows resembles a scene that we would prefer to forget today.  What happens then is a strange scene, almost brutal to our modern eyes.  The men come to see the new arrivals.  Meetings are organized in a house belonging to the nuns or under the supervision of the steward.  The colonists are looking for a wife and they need to act fast.

  Sometimes a few weeks, sometimes just a few days.  Imagine that you are that woman.  Barely off the boat, still sick from the crossing, you are introduced to bearded strangers, rough, marked by the cold and the work of the land.  He observes you, you observe them.  And you have to choose a man to spend the rest of your life with in a few moments.

But – and this is a crucial point, almost always forgotten – these women were not totally powerless.  It is said that they had the right to refuse a suitor and many did not hesitate to do so .  They asked very concrete, very down-to-earth questions.  Does this man own a house?  Land that has already been cleared?  Tools?  Is he hardworking or is he lazy and a drinker ?  Some refused too many men before making their choice.

  In a world that had always treated them as objects, this simple right to say no was a small, silent revolution.  For once, she was the one in charge.  Once the choice was made, everything moved at breakneck speed. The marriage contract was signed before a notary, often within a few days.  Then the priest blessed the union.

  No long engagement, no budding love, no romantic courtship under the stars.  There was one goal, and one only: to start a family immediately.  People sometimes got married just a few weeks after crossing an ocean to meet a complete stranger. Imagine waking up one morning, married to a man whose existence you were completely unaware of 3 months earlier.

  His house becomes yours.  His land is your destiny, his bed your duty.  Because behind this marriage, there was always the shadow of the royal plan, lurking in every contract.  to have children as quickly as possible, as many as possible. And that’s where the story takes a turn that will make you uncomfortable.

  Because the king didn’t just want marriages, he wanted births. Then he did something extraordinary.  He transformed motherhood into a state policy.  It is said that bonuses were promised to large families, a sum for those who reached 10 to 12 living children.  Young widows were encouraged or even pressured to remarry almost immediately, while hardened bachelors could be deprived of certain rights or penalized.

  The state’s message was chillingly clear.  The women’s bodies belonged to the settlement project.  Imagine that pressure. Barely married, you’re expected to have a child, then another.  then another one. Your value in the eyes of society as a whole is measured by the number of cribs you fill.  It is a vision of the female body that revolts us today.

  And yet, the king’s daughters responded to this call in a way that no one, not even the king, had dared to foresee.  But before the triumphs, one had to survive the most dangerous ordeal of all. Because having a child in New France was not the same as having a child in Paris.  It was risking his life every time.

  Here, there is no doctor, no hospital nearby for most, just a neighbor, a village midwife if you are lucky, a few cloths, water that has been heated and many, many prayers.  Imagine giving birth in a wooden cabin in the middle of winter, the wind howling outside, the snow piling up against the door until it blocks it.  No anesthesia, no antibiotics, no help possible if the child is in poor condition, if bleeding occurs, if fever rises.

  Each birth was a confrontation with death for both the child and the mother.  And yet, in an almost miraculous fact highlighted by historians, maternal mortality among these women remained surprisingly low.   Do you remember that ruthless selection process at the start?  Of these criteria that seemed so cruel?  They are the ones playing here.

  Selected for their robustness, hardened by a lifetime of misery, these women were among the strongest of their generation. Most had five or more children, some 10, twelve, 14. And often she raised them alone because the husbands left for months at a time, hunting, trading furs, clearing distant lands.

  The woman remained, the sole guardian of the home, the farm, and the children, facing the vast white expanse.  And for a woman born in the mild French countryside, the Canadian winter was like landing on another planet.  Imagine 6 months of cold, the temperature plunging to minus sometimes more, the snow rising up to the windows, the wide river freezing completely, the outside world freezing white, mute, deadly, in the house, a single room more or less warm around the hearth, we live there, we sleep there, we cook there, we give birth to children there,

all huddled together. Wood must be cut relentlessly, snow melted to obtain water, food rationed to last until spring, and frostbite treated to gnaw at fingers and toes.  The hygiene we all dream of today was once an almost impossible luxury.  Taking a full bath in the middle of winter could kill you.

  We lived in the smoke of the hearth, the sweat, wearing the same rough woolen clothes for weeks on end.  In that world, the body hardened where it gave way. These women, thrown into a climate that none of them could have imagined, learned not only to survive, but to build.  And meanwhile, behind their backs, another battle was raging, a battle against their own reputation.

  Because while she was fighting to stay alive, a poisonous rumor was spreading in France as well as in the colony.  It was whispered that these women sent by the shipload were nothing but street girls, prostitutes, women of ill repute whom the king wanted to rid the slums of Paris of by sending them to the ends of the earth.

  The accusation was profoundly unfair and largely false. Historians have since demonstrated this. The vast majority were pious orphans, poor but honest girls, carefully examined and recommended by the nuns who supervised them.  A few isolated cases may have existed, as in any human group, but they have been turned into a dark legend to tarnish hundreds of women with a single word.  Imagine the injustice.

You are crossing an ocean at the risk of your life.  You give birth in the cold, you clear the land.  You sew.  You survive to found an entire country and you get spat on.  You are treated like you’re less than nothing.  This slander has clung to their name for centuries.  It took a very long time for history to finally do them justice.

Let’s get back to their daily lives.  Because even after marriage, everything was far from resolved.  Some discovered too late that the chosen husband drank or turned out to be violent [music] or lazy, unable to manage his land and feed his family.  It sometimes happened that a daughter of the king would have a marriage contract annulled before the union when she discovered the truth in time.

  A rare kind of courage in that world.  A remarkable fact that is often forgotten in this new France.  Women had rights that were recognized by law and which were sometimes more extensive than in metropolitan France.  She could sign contracts, manage household assets in the absence of the inherited husband, and find herself at the head of an entire farm, initially the sole mistress.

The story is told of a woman who became a widow very young [music] with five or six children to support, and who remarried within a few months.  Not out of frivolity or lack of heart, but out of pure necessity. survival.  In this unforgiving world, a single woman with children and a farm to run simply could not cope without a man by her side.

  [music] The body, once again, was caught in an implacable machine.  Love was not the issue.  Surviving was.  So these women literally built from nothing.  Imagine arriving on a half-cleared piece of land with only a poorly joined wooden cabin , a few tools and a husband you barely know as your inheritance.  Everything must be created, everything invented, the land cultivated, wool spun, clothes woven and sewn for the whole family, bread baked, meat and fish salted for winter, sick cared for, children brought into the world and educated.  The

king’s daughter was not a princess sitting in a gilded drawing room.  She was the central worker, the pillar of the entire colony .  Without it, there would be no food preserved for the winter, no clothes, no home, no children who would survive the spring.  She got up before dawn and went to bed long after everyone else.

  Her hands were becoming hard and calloused, her skin was marked by the cold and the labor.  And yet, year after year, around these silent women, an entirely new world was taking shape.  House after house, cradle after cradle.  And let’s not forget where this home was located. Not in a peaceful countryside, but at the edge of the known world.

  Around the isolated farms, there was the forest, immense, dark, full of unknown noises.  There was the deadly cold, the wolves, the bear.  And there were also the sometimes violent tensions with certain indigenous nations in a territory that France disputed with others.  Imagine being left alone with your children in an isolated cabin while your husband is away for weeks trading furs.

  Every creak outside sends a chill down your spine.  Every winter night is a night of vigil.  These women had to learn pure courage.  Not the courage of a moment, but the kind that lasts for years.  The challenge of keeping a home afloat alone in a world that could engulf you at any moment.  And the most incredible thing is what they managed to do with it, because the result of all this absolutely surpasses anything Louis XIV had dared to hope for.

  In 10 years, from 1663 to 1673, it is estimated that 768 to approximately 800 women crossed the ocean.  The figures vary slightly depending on the historians’ counts. The program ended in 1673. Not because of failure, on the contrary, but because the king now needed his money to finance his wars in Europe and above all because he simply no longer needed it.

  The mission was accomplished and then some. These few hundred women gave birth to thousands of children, several thousand in just a few decades.  The colony’s population, long stagnant and dying, suddenly began to double and then grow endlessly.  What a few hundred women accomplished in one generation, no army, no fleet, no royal decree could ever have done.

  They filled an empty country.  They kept him alive.  And now comes the most dizzying part of this whole story, the one I promised you at the beginning.  Hold on tight.   Even today, it is estimated that the vast majority of Quebecers of French descent, about two out of three according to several studies, are directly descended from these women, these orphans, these nameless girls who were locked behind the grey walls of the petri dish.

  Understand what this means.  Millions of people in North America today carry the blood of a king’s daughter in their veins .  Behind countless families, there is a sick 20-year-old woman in the hold of a ship in 1665 who refused to give up.  These women whom no one mourned at the time of their departure, these girls whom no one wanted, became, without ever knowing it, the founding mothers of an entire people.

  They gave birth to a nation.  Kings were painted. Queens, mistresses, and ministers were painted in powdered wigs.  But tell me, who has ever painted the portrait of a king’s daughter?  Almost no one.  They do not have an official portrait hanging in a museum.  No glorious tomb, no statue in the gardens of Versailles.

  Most of them left only a single line in a parish register.  A name hastily scribbled by a notary, an awkward cross drawn in place of a signature because many could neither read nor write.   This is the truth hidden behind the beautiful golden legend. Official history has preserved the name of the king who sent them but has allowed the name of almost each of them to sink into oblivion.

  And yet, it was they who did the work, they who bled, gave birth, froze, cried.  and survived. The king, for his part, signed a decree with a gloved hand from thousands of kilometers away. They paid with their bodies every day for an entire lifetime. So, let’s return one last time to you, to that young woman from the very beginning.

You didn’t choose anything.  Neither your birth into poverty, nor the orphanage, nor the walls of the petri dish, nor this boat.  This is the only real choice life has ever given you .  You either lie down and give up, or you get up and move forward.  And you moved forward, you crossed the ocean, you faced scurvy, deadly cold, loneliness, fear, slander.

  You gave birth to children in a cabin in the snow with no one to help you, and you persevered again and again.  It is not the noisy courage of battles and flags snapping in the wind.  It is a quieter, more tenacious, infinitely deeper courage, that of surviving day after day and giving life in a world that wanted you for nothing else .

  The king’s daughters never wore crowns on their heads, but few reindeer in all of French history have accomplished as much as she. For centuries, they were forgotten or worse, mocked, vilified, reduced to that old, infamous rumor of a girl of ill repute.  It took the patient work of genealogists and historians to gradually unearth [music] the truth to understand that these women were neither fairy-tale princesses nor street girls but survivors, builders, founders in the noblest sense of the term.

  Today in Quebec, these women are finally being given back their names. Their descendants are traced back generations. entire families discover that they trace their ancestry back to one of them.  We celebrate their memory, we engrave their name, we tell their story.  These orphans, whom France had wanted to forget, have become, three centuries later, a source of immense pride.

  Imagine how one of them would feel if she could see that.  She who drew an awkward cross at the bottom of a marriage contract in 1667 because she did not know how to write her own name.  Today, thousands of people bear this name, and they bear it with pride.  So the next time someone talks to you about Louis XIV, the Sun King, the glory of Versailles and its gilded splendors, remember another setting.

Remember a dark ship’s hold in 1665. A young woman of twenty, without father, without mother, without a penny, sick in the dark, clutching to her heart a small chest and a simple needle.  She did not choose this journey, but she chose to survive. And by surviving, day after day, she gave birth to an entire people.

  They were called the sons of the king.  But the truth, the real truth, is that she owed nothing to the king.  The king and an entire country owe them absolutely everything.  If this story has touched you, take a moment to pay them the tribute that history has so long denied them.  A like, a subscription and a comment for these forgotten women.

  And tell me, did you know their true story ?  Which other forgotten woman would you like us to talk about next time?  I read everything.  See you soon on Echo of the Past.