The occasion of this renewed effort at assimilation through boarding-school education was the election of New France to the status of a royal colony in 1663. In particular, the king’s able minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the intendant Jean Talon gave consideration in the 1660s to providing for Indian missions and education in a wide ranging scheme to establish both the economy and the society on a sounder foundation. At its heart, Colbert’s scheme was based on mercantilist presuppositions about trade, population, and national strength. An effective way of boosting the French population in North America without depopulating old France was to convert some of the indigenous population into French men and women.

       The French effort in the seventeenth century failed for reasons that would become depressingly familiar to generations of assimilators from the early nineteenth century onward. First and foremost was parental resistance to separation from their children, an attitude that the French thought was unusually strong among the Indians of North America because of their excessive love of offspring. As the Récollet Gabriel Sagard noted, ‘they love their children dearly,’ even though ‘they are for the most part very naughty children, paying little respect, and hardly more obedience.’ To a European Christian it seemed that ‘unhappily in these lands the young have no respect for the old, nor are children obedient to their parents and moreover there are no punishment for any fault.’ In any event, the Europeans’ censoriousness about Indian children, and their proclivity to employ corporal punishment for disciplinary purposes, made it very difficult to secure children to be sent to France to be educated, and almost as hard to procure them for a boarding-school located far from a band’s usual homeland.