Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the Review of the history of New Franceissue 4 (spring 2024)
The year 2023 marked the end of a decade-long commemoration cycle around the 350e anniversary of the “contingents” of the king’s daughters who arrived in the colony between 1663 and 1673. The opportunity is therefore timely to look at the commemorative trajectory of this group which has benefited from high visibility in recent years.
In Quebec, emigration has long been the main subject of commemoration of the French Regime. Fueled by genealogy, the memory of ancestors who came from France has generated a rich associative life and countless commemorative gestures around the original families.
If the king’s daughters were already part of this story of the pioneers, recent commemorations pay tribute to them no longer as individual wives, but as a group of women sharing a common experience and characteristics. […]
In 2013, the 350e anniversary of the arrival of the first daughters of the king in 1663 is based on an ambitious program, which is deployed on both sides of the Atlantic and which is mainly supported by the Historical Society of the Daughters of the King and the Franco-Quebec Commission on Common Places of Memory (now Franco-Quebec Memory Commission). This bilateral commemoration is distinguished by the use of living history: in the summer of 2013, 36 volunteers played the role of the 36 women who came to Canada in 1663 during a tour which took them notably to Perche, Poitou and Normandy. […]
Beyond the actions, it is a discourse which is structured over the years and which gives a feminist and nationalist flavor to the commemoration of the king’s daughters. From wives in the shadow of their pioneer husbands, they are now celebrated as a group of women to whom common virtues, such as bravery and hard work, are attributed.
If this discourse sometimes suffers from swelling – in the documentary context of the period, how can we truly judge the character of these women? —, it has the merit of bringing to the fore the agency of the king’s daughters. […]
Despite the ambition to restore individuality to the king’s daughters, the portrait drawn by the commemorations of recent years is above all that of a group united by a common destiny. Starting with the destiny of mother, even if some of the king’s daughters did not have children and others never married or even returned to France.
Maternity
More than their condition as migrants or their role as pioneers, it is motherhood which allows the articulation of a nationalist discourse with the commemoration of the king’s daughters, who thus became the “mothers of the Quebec nation”.
The capsule devoted to them in the recent educational series Our Giants produced by the Lionel-Groulx Foundation is entirely representative of this positioning of the king’s daughters as “mothers of the nation”, to the point that they have the honor to be the subject of the very first capsule of the series.
If the exposition of the subject follows the usual lines – origins, rapid marriage, numerous motherhoods – and emphasizes their demographic influence, it also emphasizes the cultural effect of the king’s daughters, to whom ” [nous] owe our language, our culture, our know-how, and even our nursery rhymes and our songs”, to use the words of the narrator Annie-Soleil Proteau. Not being developed in the capsule, this assertion is frequently repeated in the discourse on the king’s daughters.
The use of French as a common language, in particular, is presented as a major legacy. The assertion is based on the fact that nearly half of the king’s daughters came from the Paris region and that they mainly spoke French, which contributed to the spread of French in a Canada where a high proportion of migrants came from the provinces. where French was not the main language of use.
In a context where patois was spoken at the family and community level, the diversity of migrants’ origins already favored the use of French as a common language, but, according to historian Yves Landry, this contribution would have precipitated the linguistic standardization of the colony, which occurs from the 17the century, unlike the metropolis.
In a Quebec concerned about the survival of French, this dimension of the story of the king’s daughters acquires a new resonance. The memory of these women, pioneers, ancestors, mothers and now “Francizers”, is still enriched today with new layers of meaning. […]
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