Education, Francisation, and Shifting Colonial Priorities at the Ursuline Convent in Seventeenth-Century Québec

Abstract

One of the goals of the nuns at the Ursuline convent in seventeenth-century Québec was to “Frenchify” Indigenous students. This paper presents a new way of interpreting the question of whether the Ursulines succeeded or failed in their efforts at francisation by reading Marie de l'Incarnation's concerns with her order's progress against a broader history of French colonial policy. When royal authorities in France and their agents in New France started to demand that missionaries do more to compel people to replace Indigenous customs with French ones, the Ursulines remained committed to a different approach. Students at the Ursuline convent school retained many Indigenous practices, and the nuns recognized that they had to adapt their pedagogical approaches to fit the realities of daily life in Canada. In facing changing French ideals about assimilation, the Ursulines crafted careful responses by using an additive and accommodationist approach that shows the complexity of francisation within a variegated and dynamic French colonial experience.