Two sisters, four years, one crown program

"Filles du roi" gets used loosely — on this site's own predecessor, it was used loosely — as a catch-all for any single Frenchwoman who emigrated to Quebec in the seventeenth century. It names something more specific than that, and the more specific fact is the more interesting one.

Before the program

Between 1634 and 1662, a few hundred unmarried Frenchwomen crossed to New France on their own initiative, or a family's, or a religious order's — the filles à marier, "girls to be married." No state sponsorship. No dowry. No apparatus built to record them as a category, which is exactly why they're harder to trace today: nobody was keeping a list. Roughly thirty of them sit confirmed in this family's direct ancestry — somewhere on the Oligny line, or somewhere on the Saurette line.

The King's daughters, 1663–1673

In 1663, Louis XIV's government started paying for it directly. Roughly 770 women crossed under the Crown program that gives this page half its name — transportation and settlement costs covered by the King, many of them married with a royal dowry attached to the contract, sometimes cash, sometimes an outfit of household goods. Roughly forty-three of them sit confirmed in this family's direct ancestry — again, on one line or the other — fifteen of them married to soldiers of the Carignan-Salières Regiment — the same regiment, and often the same discharge-and-settle pipeline, that produced dit-names like Larose (see Dit Names).

The word that follows them around

There is a story about the filles du roi that is nearly as old as the program, and a reader who has met the term anywhere else has probably met it: that the King's daughters were prostitutes, swept off the streets of Paris and shipped out to populate a colony. The story is persistent enough that the one scholarly study this project holds on the women's origins puts the two words side by side in its title — Protestant, Prostitute or Both?, a peer-reviewed article of 1989 — and everything that study found, as this project holds it, is about the first word.

What the record shows the Crown worrying about was not morals but religion. The program recruited heavily from Aunis and Normandy, the most Protestant regions of northern France, and the state paid for it to be so: a letter from Colbert in March 1669 records a grant of three thousand livres a year to a house in La Rochelle whose whole purpose was to receive filles nouvellement converties — Huguenot girls, catechised into Catholics on paper — before they embarked. Bishop Laval complained about the result to Rome and to Paris, in 1663 and again in 1670: the women arriving at Québec were “hardly zealous for religion,” and the ones from Aunis were Catholics in name only. That is the documented official anxiety about the filles du roi, from the men who ran the program and the bishop who received them. It is a confessional worry, and it produced a paper trail. The other story did not.

This family's own fille du roi shows what the program looked like from the inside. Isabelle Doucinet landed in 1666 at nineteen with a dowry of goods worth two hundred livres, and married Jacques Bédard at Notre-Dame de Québec that October. The 1681 census finds the two of them at Charlesbourg with seven children in the house; she was buried there in 1710 at sixty-three, her husband still living. And the interesting thing the program had hidden about her was exactly the thing the Crown was worried about: she was a Protestant, baptised in the temple at La Rochelle, and on the reading of the leading historian of Protestants in New France her marriage to the son of another Huguenot family was a deliberate one — two Reformed households marrying their children to each other in a Catholic church, before a priest who wrote nothing down. Two of the eight shared ancestresses on this site were Huguenots, one on each side of the policy line this page is about: her sister Marguerite, a fille à marier, and Marguerite Ardion, a fille du roi of 1663 whose family is documented at the Reformed church of La Rochelle three generations deep.

The honest limit of what this site can say: it has read one scholar on the question and holds no primary source on the myth itself, so it does not pronounce on the program as a whole. What it can say is what its own acts say — a dowry, a marriage within the year, a full household fifteen years on, and a religious history the record was built to conceal. Nothing in them supports the word.

Dawson, “The ‘Filles du roy’ Sent to New France: Protestant, Prostitute or Both?” (1989), an authored scholarly source, for the Crown's recruitment, the La Rochelle house of new converts and Laval's complaints · Bédard, Les protestants en Nouvelle-France (1978), sighted, for the sisters' Protestant identity and the Doucinet–Bédard marriage as deliberate endogamy · marriage act 4 Oct 1666, Notre-Dame de Québec, the 1681 Charlesbourg census and burial act 21 Nov 1710, sighted · Gagné, Before the King's Daughters, for Ardion's Protestant baptism, compiled · Register 03 §3.19 · graded Proven as to the Doucinet facts and Isabelle's Protestant origin; Probable as to Ardion's, on Gagné; the general history is context, and no grade is asserted for it

One family, both sides of the line

The clearest illustration of the distinction isn't two unrelated women. It's two sisters.

Pierre Doucinet, a master cobbler, and Florence Cantau married in 1640 at the Protestant temple in La Rochelle. Their daughter Marguerite was born the following year, baptized in that same Huguenot church. Their daughter Isabelle followed six years later. Both girls grew up in the same Protestant household, in the same French port city — and then their lives split on either side of one royal policy.

Marguerite crossed in 1662, a year before the program existed, as a fille à marier. No dowry, no sponsorship, uncounted by the state she was moving into. Isabelle crossed four years later, in 1666, as a fille du roi — nineteen years old, with a dowry of goods worth 200 livres. Both married Catholic men in Catholic ceremonies within a year of arrival; both, in effect, converted on landing, in a colony that made no record of the fact and asked no questions about it.

Doucinet-Cantau marriage, 1 May 1640, La Rochelle, from printed founding-stock sources · Isabelle's marriage to Jacques Bédard, 4 Oct 1666, Notre-Dame-de-Québec, sighted · graded Proven as to the two Québec marriages and the sisters' Protestant origin (Register 03 §3.19, on Bédard); Probable as to the 1640 temple marriage, which rests on printed sources

If Marguerite Doucinet's name looks familiar, it should — she's one of the two ancestresses behind the convergence, the woman both the Oligny and Saurette lines descend from — nine generations above the 1912 groom, eight above the bride. She married Philippe Mathieu dit la Barie at Québec in December 1662, the same year she landed, with no state apparatus behind her and no dowry ahead of her. Her sister, four years and one royal signature later, arrived with both.

Two counts, and why the smaller one matters

The numbers above — roughly thirty filles à marier, roughly forty-three filles du roi — are ancestors of this family in the ordinary sense. Each of them sits somewhere on the Oligny line, or somewhere on the Saurette line. Seventy-odd women, one line each.

Counted from the project's own tree file, a compiled source, and rounded · graded Possible→Probable as counts: each woman's place on a line is only as good as the joints beneath her, and most of those seventy have not been worked act by act. The eight below have.

Eight of them are ancestors of both. Not through a single shared descent, but on two entirely separate chains that run parallel for two and a half centuries and don't touch again until Joseph Philorum Oligny married Marie-Anna Saurette at Holyoke in 1912. Four are filles à marier, four are filles du roi — an even split across the policy line this page is about.

That smaller number is the one this site is really about, and it's the reason the 1912 couple were already cousins eight times over, on eight separate reckonings, without knowing it. They're listed, grouped by category, on Shared Ancestors.

Everywhere else in these records, women exist mostly as clauses in men's documents — named as "daughter of," "wife of," present at a marriage act mainly to be married. The filles du roi are close to the one exception. For that decade, the Crown sponsored, transported, dowered, and recorded her, and the man she married is the one who shows up in her file. It doesn't last — by the next generation the record has gone back to organizing itself around the men — but for these women, briefly, the paperwork ran the other way.