The Mothers of Canada

Twenty livres were given to each youth who married before the age of twenty, and to each girl who married before the age of sixteen.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 13.

Thus qualified canonically and physically, the annual consignment of young women was shipped to Quebec, in charge of a matron employed and paid by the king. Her task was not an easy one, for the troop under her care was apt to consist of what Mother Mary in a moment of unwonted levity calls “mixed goods.” [1] On one occasion the office was undertaken by the pious widow of Jean Bourdon. Her flock of a hundred and fifty girls, says Mother Mary, “gave her no little trouble on the voyage; for they are of all sorts, and some of them are very rude and hard to manage.” Madame Bourdon was not daunted. She not only saw her charge distributed and married, but she continued to receive and care for the subsequent ship-loads as they arrived summer after summer. She was indeed chief among the pious duennas of whom La Hontan irreverently speaks. Marguerite Bourgeoys did the same good offices for the young women sent to Montreal. Here the “king’s girls,” as they were called, were all lodged together in a house to which the suitors repaired to make their selection. “I was obliged to live there myself,” writes the excellent nun, “because families were to be formed;” [2] that is to say, because it was she who superintended these extemporized unions. Meanwhile she taught the girls their catechism, and, more fortunate than Madame Bourdon, inspired them with a confidence and affection which they retained long after.

[1: “Une marchandise mêlée.” Lettre du — 1668. In that year, 1668, the king spent 40,000 livres in the shipment of men and girls. In 1669, a hundred and fifty girls were sent; in 1670, a hundred and sixty-five; and Talon asks for a hundred and fifty or two hundred more to supply the soldiers who had got ready their houses and clearings, and were now prepared to marry. The total number of girls sent from 1665 to 1673, inclusive, was about a thousand.]

[2: Extract in Faillon, Colonie Française, III. 214.]

At Quebec, where the matrimonial market was on a larger scale, a more ample bazaar was needed. That the girls were assorted into three classes, each penned up for selection in a separate hall, is a statement probable enough in itself, but resting on no better authority than that of La Hontan. Be this as it may, they were submitted together to the inspection of the suitor; and the awkward young peasant or the rugged soldier of Carignan was required to choose a bride without delay from among the anxious candidates. They, on their part, were permitted to reject any applicant who displeased them, and the first question, we are told, which most of them asked was whether the suitor had a house and a farm.

Great as was the call for wives, it was thought prudent to stimulate it. The new settler was at once enticed and driven into wedlock. Bounties were offered on early marriages. Twenty livres were given to each youth who married before the age of twenty, and to each girl who married before the age of sixteen. [3] This, which was called the “king’s gift,” was exclusive of the dowry given by him to every girl brought over by his orders. The dowry varied greatly in form and value; but, according to Mother Mary, it was sometimes a house with provisions for eight months. More often it was fifty livres in household supplies, besides a barrel or two of salted meat. The royal solicitude extended also to the children of colonists already established. “I pray you,” writes Colbert to Talon, “to commend it to the consideration of the whole people, that their prosperity, their subsistence, and all that is dear to them, depend on a general resolution, never to be departed from, to marry youths at eighteen or nineteen years and girls at fourteen or fifteen; since abundance can never come to them except through the abundance of men.”

[3: Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du Roy (see Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67).]

[Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668.]

This counsel was followed by appropriate action. Any father of a family who, without showing good cause, neglected to marry his children when they had reached the ages of twenty and sixteen was fined; [4] and each father thus delinquent was required to present himself every six months to the local authorities to declare what reason, if any, he had for such delay. [5] Orders were issued, a little before the arrival of the yearly ships from France, that all single men should marry within a fortnight after the landing of the prospective brides. No mercy was shown to the obdurate bachelor. Talon issued an order forbidding unmarried men to hunt, fish, trade with the Indians, or go into the woods under any pretense whatsoever. [6] In short, they were made as miserable as possible. Colbert goes further. He writes to the intendant, “those who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage should be made to bear additional burdens, and be excluded from all honors: it would be well even to add some marks of infamy.” [7] The success of these measures was complete. “No sooner,” says Mother Mary, “have the vessels arrived than the young men go to get wives; and, by reason of the great number they are married by thirties at a time.” Throughout the length and breadth of Canada, Hymen, if not Cupid, was whipped into a frenzy of activity. Dollier de Casson tells us of a widow who was married afresh before her late husband was buried. [8]

[4: Arrêts du Conseil d’Etat, 1669 (cited by Faillon); Arrêt du Conseil d Etat, 1670 (see Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67); Ordonnance du Roy, 5 Avril, 1669. See Clément, Instructions, etc., de Colbert, III. 2me Partie, 657.]

[5: Registre du Conseil Souverain.]

[6: Talon au Ministre, 10 Oct., 1670. Colbert highly approves this order. Faillon found a case of its enforcement among the ancient records of Montreal. In December, 1670, François Le Noir, an inhabitant of La Chine, was summoned before the judge, because, though a single man, he had traded with Indians at his own house. He confessed the fact, but protested that he would marry within three weeks after the arrival of the vessels from France, or, failing to do so, that he would give a hundred and fifty livres to the church of Montreal, and an equal sum to the hospital.

On this condition he was allowed to trade, but was still forbidden to go into the woods. The next year he kept his word, and married Marie Magdeleine Charbonnier, late of Paris.

The prohibition to go into the woods was probably intended to prevent the bachelor from finding a temporary Indian substitute for a French wife.]

[7: “Il serait à propos de leur augmenter les charges, de les priver de tous honneurs, même d’y ajouter quelque marque d’infamie.” Lettre du 20 Fev., 1668.]

[8: Histoire du Montréal, A.B. 1671, 1672.]

Nor was the fatherly care of the king confined to the humbler classes of his colonists. He wished to form a Canadian noblesse, to which end early marriages were thought needful among officers and others of the better sort. The progress of such marriages was carefully watched and reported by the intendant. We have seen the reward bestowed upon La Motte for taking to himself a wife, and the money set apart for the brother officers who imitated him. In his dispatch of October, 1667, the intendant announces that two captains are already married to two damsels of the country; that a lieutenant has espoused a daughter of the governor of Three Rivers; and that “four ensigns are in treaty with their mistresses, and are already half engaged.” [9] The paternal care of government, one would think, could scarcely go further.

[9: “Quatre enseignes sont en pourparler avec leurs maîtresses et sent déjà à demi engagés.” Dépêche du 27 Oct., 1667. The lieutenant was René Gaultier de Varennes, who on the 26th September, 1667, married Marie Boucher, daughter of the governor of Three Rivers, aged twelve years. One of the children of this marriage was Varennes de la Vérendrye, discoverer of the Rocky Mountains.]

It did, however, go further. Bounties were offered on children. The king, in council, passed a decree “that in future all inhabitants of the said country of Canada who shall have living children to the number of ten, born in lawful wedlock, not being priests, monks, or nuns, shall each be paid out of the moneys sent by his Majesty to the said country a pension of three hundred livres a year, and those who shall have twelve children, a pension of four hundred livres; and that, to this effect, they shall be required to declare the number of their children every year in the months of June or July to the intendant of justice, police, and finance, established in the said country, who, having verified the same, shall order the payment of said pensions, one-half in cash, and the other half at the end of each year.” [10] This was applicable to all. Colbert had before offered a reward, intended specially for the better class, of twelve hundred livres to those who had fifteen children, and eight hundred to those who had ten.

[10: Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67. It was thought at this time that the Indians, mingled with the French, might become a valuable part of the population. The reproductive qualities of Indian women, therefore, became an object of Talon’s attention, and he reports that they impair their fertility by nursing their children longer than is necessary; “but,” he adds, “this obstacle to the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by a police regulation.” Mémoire sur l’Etat Présent du Canada, 1667,]

These wise encouragements, as the worthy Faillon calls them, were crowned with the desired result. A dispatch of Talon in 1670 informs the minister that most of the young women sent out last summer are pregnant already, and in 1671 he announces that from six hundred to seven hundred children have been born in the colony during the year; a prodigious number in view of the small population. The climate was supposed to be particularly favorable to the health of women, which is somewhat surprising in view of recent American experience. “The first reflection I have to make,” says Dollier de Casson, “is on the advantage that women have in this place (Montreal) over men, for though the cold is very wholesome to both sexes, it is incomparably more so to the female, who is almost immortal here.” Her fecundity matched her longevity, and was the admiration of Talon and his successors, accustomed as they were to the scanty families of France.

Why with this great natural increase joined to an immigration which, though greatly diminishing, did not entirely cease, was there not a corresponding increase in the population of the colony? Why, more than half a century after the king took Canada in charge, did the census show a total of less than twenty-five thousand souls? The reasons will appear hereafter.

It is a peculiarity of Canadian immigration, at this its most flourishing epoch, that it was mainly an immigration of single men and single women. The cases in which entire families came over were comparatively few. [11] The new settler was found by the king; sent over by the king; and supplied by the king with a wife, a farm, and sometimes with a house. Well did Louis XIV. earn the title of Father of New France. But the royal zeal was spasmodic. The king was diverted to other cares, and soon after the outbreak of the Dutch war in 1672 the regular dispatch of emigrants to Canada well nigh ceased; though the practice of disbanding soldiers in the colony, giving them lands, and turning them into settlers, was continued in some degree, even to the last.

[11: The principal emigration of families seems to have been in 1669 when, at the urgency of Talon, then in France, a considerable number were sent out. In the earlier period the emigration of families was, relatively, much greater. Thus, in 1634, the physician Giffard brought over seven to people his seigniory of Beauport. Before 1663, when the king took the colony in hand, the emigrants were for the most part apprenticed laborers.

The zeal with which the king entered into the work of stocking his colony is shown by numberless passages in his letters, and those of his minister. “The end and the rule of all your conduct,” says Colbert to the intendant Bouteroue, “should be the increase of the colony; and on this point you should never be satisfied, but labor without ceasing to find every imaginable expedient for preserving the inhabitants, attracting new ones, and multiplying them by marriage.” Instruction pour M. Bouteroue, 1668.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 13 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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