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The Baleine Brides

Introduction

Baleine Brides (or, “corrections girls”) is a term used to refer to the eighty-eight young females who arrived in Louisiana from France in 1721. They are characterized by their vagrant origins, having been shipped to Louisiana from l’Hôpital général de la Salpêtrière in Paris, France, under the care of a three nuns. Their name is eponymous of La Baleine, the ship that carried them from France to Louisiana. The Baleine Brides are considered among the first instances of mail-order brides. They arrived in Louisiana with the purpose of marrying French colonizers and bear children in order to increase the colony’s population.

Origins and Significance

Due to gender imbalance in Louisiana during early eighteenth century, male colonists, mainly consisting of coureurs de bois and soldiers, tended take indigenous women as wives or concubines. However, colonial officials feared that inter-marriage would lead to the “ensauvagement”, social regression as a consequence of interaction with indigenous peoples, of mâle colonisés. Also, by extension, the emigration of French settlement in favor of living among indigenous tribes. The potential exodus from settlements equally conflicted with colonial officials’ desire to move away from a “transient economy of Indian trade” to a colonial economy centered on family farming. Indeed, the family, with its  “natural lines of authority and duty”, was seen as essential to stabilizing colonial society. Women, as a consequence of this gender imbalance, were central to this venture.

Therefore, as a way of curtailing inter-marriage and, by extension, stabilizing Louisiana’s economy, colonial administrators such as the Inspector General of Louisiana, Bernard Diron d'Artaguiette, requested that France send women to the colony. While few women showed interest in immigrating to an unknown and underpopulated colony, by 1717, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, lifted the ban on forced immigration. Consequently, women from hospitals and poor houses began to be “exiled” to Louisiana. These women, from hospitals and orphanages, would become known as “correction girls” by French authorities before their journey to New France. Louisiana itself was the only French colony that resorted to forced migration to solve its shortage of females.

The Baleines Brides, specifically, were initially inmates at Paris’ Salpêtrière hospital. Many were prostitutes, vagrants, or orphans and were, therefore, believed to be unvirtuous.

In New France

There is a scarcity of historical information regarding La Baleine and the eventual brides who disembarked in Louisiana. Although this period of the history of Louisiana has been documented in several publications in the last decades, the history of La Baleine has not appeared in any of them. However, genealogy scholars have gathered a list of of names of the girls from the Maison de Saint Louis of the Salpêtrière, dated June, 12 1720. The girls were conducted from Paris to Painbeuf in Nantes, where they embarked on their journey to Louisiana. According to the list, the majority of the girls were teenaged or in their twenties, with the average age being nineteen years old. The youngest was Charlotte Couturier at twelve years old and the eldest was Anne Vigneron, a poisoner and counterfeiter, at thirty years old.

La Baleine docked at Mobile Port, in what is today Alabama, on January 8, 1721. The eighty-eight brides arrived with their dowry, consisting of “two suits of clothing, two skirts and petticoats, six laced bodices, six chemises [and] six headdresses” so that they would be able to marry as soon as possible. Perhaps as a way of quelling rumors of their unvirtuous nature, the girls were placed under the supervision of Sisters Gertrude, Louise and Bergere. Sister Gertrude was notorious for being unorthodox and “ill-natured” and the girls were not permitted to marry without her consent. Equally, sentries were placed at the doors of their lodgings. While no visitors were permitted in the evenings, men were given leave to visit their lodgings during the day and were encouraged to “choose from amongst them”.

Contemporary accounts suggest that the brides were in high demand. For instance, Dumont de Montigny, a soldier, reports how two men “came to blows” over one Baleine bride by the name of Hélène. While she is described to have been “anything but beautiful”, the young men ultimately resorted to drawing straws for Hélène’s hand. Indeed, in a report written by Governor Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, it is disclosed that sailors “asked insistently” for the girls. The document provides indications that Governor de Bienville was not amused with the state of the girls’ marital status, claiming that those brides could have been married to “good residents”. Nevertheless, the girls fulfilled their duty and purpose of populating Louisiana seeing as the sailors agreed to settle in the colony in exchange for the brides.

In March of 1721, de Bienville reports that nineteen of the eighty-eight girls had been married within three months of their arrival. In another of de Bienville’s reports, dated 25 June, it is mentioned that thirty-one girls had been married between 24 April and 25 June, all of which arrived on La Baleine.

Controversy

There appears to be contention within scholarship regarding comparisons between the casquettes girls, the name deriving from the French term for chest, casquette, which they would have used to carry their belongings, and the Baleine Brides. For instance, Jennifer Spear argues that the “casquettes girls”, who arrived in Louisiana in 1728, differ from the Baleine Brides in so much as they were selected for their homemaking skills, which had been lacking in the Baleine Brides, given their indigent origins.

By contrast, American legal scholar, Marcia Zug, questions whether the casquette girls ever existed. Indeed, Zug mentions that the only one ship arrived in Louisiana with women in 1728 was a ship containing Ursuline nuns. Contemporary accounts demonstrate that colonial officials were not pleased with the  Baleine Brides nor the other correction girls. For instance, the French commissioner, Jacques de La Chaise, claims that the women “did nothing but cause disorder”. It is due to their ill repute, therefore, that Zug argues that Louisianians, ashamed of their ancestry, transformed corrections girls such as the Baleine Brides  into casquette girls.

In Popular Culture

In literature

The “low character” of correction girls such as the Baleine Brides is recounted in the 1731 novel by Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut. Initially set in France, the novel recounts the tumultuous love affair between Chevalier des Grieux, a well-to-do nobleman, who gives up his title to run away with his rebellious lover Manon Lescaut. The lovers subsequently endure many trials and tribulations such as Lescaut’s deportation to New Orleans as a prostitute. The novel was controversial during the time of its publication, but was nevertheless popular because of its scandalous and unorthodox subject matter.

References

Ardoin, Bruce. “Notes and Documents: The Baleine Brides - A Missing Ship's Roll for Louisiana, 1721.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 75 (1987): 303-305.

Blumenthal, Walter Hart. Brides from Bridewell. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co. Inc., 1962.

Powell, Lawrence N. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Tuttle, Leslie. Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Spear, Jennifer M. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Zug, Marcia. “Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: The Forgotten History of America's First Mail-Order Brides,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 20, no.1 (2012): 85-125.