With peace and royal support assured in the late 1660s, New France began to fulfil the promise of population made by Champlain and kept alive by the Cent-Associes. In 1663 a third of the three thousand settlers of New France were children under fifteen, who would become the parents of many future colonists of Louis xiv. Still, after fifty years, three thousand seemed a pitifully small basis for a great royal colony, and the King embarked on a vigorous recruiting program to people New France.
One source of new settlers was the Regiment de Carignan-Salieres, the force sent in 1665 to defend the settlers from the Iroquois. With peace secured, the regiment was disbanded, and the King made it plain to the officers that he wanted to see them settle in New France. Many of the officers and about four hundred of the men complied. Soon after. New France acquired a permanent military establishment, the Compagnies branches de la Marine. These were infantry companies raised for colonial service by the Ministry of Marine rather than by the French regular army. Enlisted men for these Marine troops were always recruited in France, but their officers would come from the colonial aristocracy—which meant, in effect, the Carignan officers and their sons along with the sons of the most successful colonists and a few highborn immigrants.
New France also recruited civilian labourers—as many as five hundred in some years—and in the new conditions of peaceful expansion more of them began to stay on and settle. For these men the path to New France, under the royal government as under the Cent-Associes, began with a hiring contract, an engagement. This contract bound the hired man, or engage, to do three years’ service for his employer or anyone to whom the employer sold his contract. In return, the engage would receive passage to New France, room and board, and a small annual wage. After his three years’ labour, he was entitled to passage back to France if he chose. Engages were under no obligation to remain longer in New France—and fewer than half did.
The men recruited to New France in these years were mostly young workers or soldiers. They rarely brought wives or children with them, and only a handful of Aboriginal women ever came to live and marry amongst the French colonists. In 1663 men outnumbered women almost two to one in the colony. So began one of the most famous episodes in the peopling of New France: the recruiting of the filles du roi (“the King’s daughters”). Between 1663 and 1673, about 775 women accepted royal offers of transportation to New France. It was a straightforward arrangement: the Crown wanted the single men of the colony to have wives, and the filles du roi needed husbands. With the assistance of a royal dowry—usually fifty livres, or two-thirds of an engages annual cash earnings—90 per cent of the women found husbands, often within weeks of their arrival. According to Marie de I’lncarnation, the founder of the Ursuline convent at Quebec City, who helped house the new arrivals, the women understood clearly that men who had already begun their farms were the best prospects. “This is the first thing the girls inform themselves about,” she wrote, “and they are wise to do so.”
The first Ursuline convent in Quebec was built in 1642, when the town had only a few hundred people; it burned down in 1650. This reminiscent view dated 1850, by painter and patriate Joseph Legare (1795-1855), captures the rugged surroundings of what is now Quebec’s vieille ville; notice the wigwams in the lower right foreground.
Who were these women? Every ftlle du roi had her own story, but typical enough is that of Nicole Saulnier, an eighteen-year-old fatherless girl from Paris. She arrived at Quebec in the summer of 1669 and in October she married an engage who had settled several years earlier on the nearby lie d’Orleans. She lived there with a growing family for more than forty years. Probably she and most of the others had become filles du roi because some accident had left them orphaned or otherwise unsupported. In a society with strict rules for female conduct, young, unprotected women were vulnerable, and that dangerous situation itself may have encouraged many filles du roi to seize the chance of a state-sponsored marriage in the distant colony. For a decade, as many as 130 women a year abandoned the hazards of life in France for New France and marriage.
The filles du roi became the future of New France, for by the mid - 1670s the female population had almost doubled, and the tide of subsidized immigration, both male and female, was ending. By 1681, when the colonial population was nearly ten thousand, large-scale immigration had ceased. A few soldiers would settle in the colony, a few engage would be recruited, and a few convicts would be sent there, but most of the colony’s growth would be by natural increase.
Those ten thousand settlers of 1681 would produce most of the Francophone population of Canada. The majority of the civilian immigrants came from western France. Normandy at first provided many of the settlers, and the small adjacent region of Perche was a major source simply because of the efforts of one or two recruiters there. In 1663 a third of the colonists had roots in those two regions. But as La Rochelle replaced Rouen in Normandy as the main port of departure, the number of immigrants from the south increased, and more than half the seventeenth-century immigrants came from south of the Loire River, the traditional border of northern and southern France. Both northerners and southerners tended to come from provinces near the Atlantic, the exception being that many of the filles du roi and the soldiers were from Paris. In the end, half the immigrant population was city-born. Cities were the centres of crafts and industry, and so—although the vast majority of the French populace were rural peasants—half the male immigrants to New France claimed a trade. More than a third may have been literate, probably because they had learned some reading and writing “on the job” in a skilled trade.
As a group, the immigrants were poor (like most people of their time), but they surely were not among the most destitute of French society. They were more skilled, more literate, more urban, and more likely to come from the coastal provinces or towns than most of their contemporaries. In New France such skills and literacy would soon be lost in a colony fast becoming rural and agricultural. New accents and speech patterns would evolve from the mix of regional dialects, and new customs and traditions would be forged out of a varied inheritance.
Demographers—those who study population—used to consider a birth rate of somewhere above forty births per thousand people per year a “natural” rate of increase in a population without artificial restraints on reproduction. Today, there is a greater awareness that demography is never “natural”: it is always linked in complex ways to a society’s particular circumstances. Yet the birth rate of early Canada continues to impress. Over most of the century from 1663 to 1763—and beyond—the people of New France produced offspring at a rate of fifty-five or even sixty-five births per year per thousand people. (In modern Canada the birth rate is about fifteen per thousand, and even at the height of the mid-twentieth-century “baby boom” it never exceeded thirty per thousand.) Their annual death rate was kept to a relatively happy twenty-five to thirty per thousand, and the ten thousand settlers of 1681 expanded their numbers at a remarkable rate, almost unassisted by new immigration.
In the healthy environment of the New World, spared the grinding poverty and crowding of Europe, the colonists lived longer. Even newborns had a higher survival rate—perhaps three-quarters could expect to survive to adulthood. The high birth rate, which was the key to rapid increase in the population, has a simple explanation: women married young and they remarried quickly if widowed. Before 1680 half of New France’s brides were married before they were twenty. Couples began families as soon as they married (premarital conceptions were less than 5 per cent of all births), and they kept having children as long as they could. As a result a child often had six or seven siblings, and more than half grew up in households of ten children or more. The children repeated the early-marriage, large-family experience of their parents, and so the population grew. This easy explanation is deceptive, however. It misses the real question. Early marriage was the secret to a high birth rate, in New France as in most North American colonies, but why did people choose to marry early?
World History
