When Anne Cloutier was just ten years old, her father promised her hand in marriage to Robert Drouin. Anne Cloutier died at 22 years old after given birth to 6 children.
When Anne Cloutier was just ten years old, her father promised her hand in marriage to Robert Drouin. However, due to her young age, the actual wedding didn’t happen until a year later, on July 12, 1637, at the Church of Notre-Dame de Quebec. Interestingly, their marriage contract included a provision forbidding conjugal visits for two years.
Tragically, Anne passed away at the age of 22 after giving birth to six children.
It wasn’t until two decades later, during Louis XIV’s reign, that significant changes came to Canada’s colonization efforts. Louis XIV implemented programs to encourage women to immigrate to Canada for the purpose of marriage. These initiatives, known as Filles à marier and Filles du roi (marriageable women and the king’s daughters), aimed to address the gender imbalance in the colony.
The Filles du roi, also called the King’s Daughters, were around 768 women who arrived in New France (now Canada) between 1663 and 1673. Sponsored by Louis XIV, these women were primarily single and some were orphans. Louis XIV even provided a dowry of 50 livres to some of them, documented in their marriage contracts, to facilitate their marriages to unmarried male colonists in Canada.
The arrival of these women marked a turning point in Canada’s history, significantly boosting the colony’s population and success.
Today, millions of people of French Canadian descent, spread across Quebec, the rest of Canada, the USA, and beyond, trace their roots back to these courageous women of the 17th century.