Filles du Roy

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle French Filles du Roy.

Proper noun

Filles du Roy

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.
- 1971, The cultural tradition of Canadian women: the historical background:
  Considered from our own historical vantage-point, the lot of the Filles du Roy certainly seems to have been less than enviable.
- 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:
  The Filles du roy were sent out from France to assure that the men would stay on the land.
- 1991, The Canadian Modern Language Review - Volume 48, page 349:
  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.
- 2001, Janis L. Pallister, The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert: Essays on Her Works, →ISBN, page 92:
  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.