La Corriveau: Quebec City's Most Infamous Woman
She has been called a murderer, a witch, a victim, and a symbol. She has inspired novels, operas, plays, films, and one of the most striking figures in Quebec folklore. Her iron cage is now on display in a museum. And on April 18, 1763 — just months after the British conquest of New France — a 30-year-old woman named Marie-Josephte Corriveau was hanged near the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, her body locked into a gibbet and displayed at Pointe-Lévy for five weeks as a warning to all who passed. What happened before and after that execution is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of this city.
A Woman Caught Between Two Worlds
La Corriveau's story unfolds at one of the most turbulent moments in Quebec's history. The conquest of New France was barely complete. The British military was still governing the colony. French-speaking Canadians were navigating life under a foreign power, in a foreign language, before courts they did not control or fully understand.
Marie-Josephte Corriveau was born in Saint-Vallier, near Quebec City, on May 14, 1733. She married her first husband, Charles Bouchard, at sixteen. He died in 1760 — of causes that were never disputed. She married again in 1761, this time to a farmer named Louis Dodier. On the night of January 26-27, 1763, Dodier was found dead in his stable, his head badly wounded. The initial conclusion was that he had been kicked by his horses.
An investigation told a different story.
Two Trials, One Confession
The first trial opened on March 29, 1763, at the Ursuline convent in Quebec City — the British military had converted part of it into a tribunal. Twelve English officers presided, with Lieutenant Colonel Roger Morris at the helm. The proceedings were conducted entirely in English. Marie-Josephte Corriveau spoke French.
The first verdict found her father, Joseph Corriveau, guilty of the murder and sentenced him to hang. Marie-Josephte was condemned as an accomplice — to receive 60 lashes and have her hand branded with the letter M for murder.
Then, the night before his scheduled execution, Joseph Corriveau made a confession. He had not killed Louis Dodier. His daughter had.
A second trial was convened on April 15. Marie-Josephte confessed that she had struck her husband on the head with a hatchet while he slept — twice. She cited years of abuse at his hands. The court was unmoved. On April 18, 1763, she was hanged at the Buttes-à-Nepveu, near the Plains of Abraham.
The Cage
What happened next was unusual even by the standards of 18th-century justice. Under English law, the court ordered that Marie-Josephte's body be placed in a gibbet — an iron cage shaped roughly to the human form — and displayed publicly as a deterrent. The cage was erected at Pointe-Lévy, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, visible to anyone crossing the river or sailing past.
It remained there for five weeks, until a governor's order on May 25 finally authorized its removal. During those five weeks, it became a landmark — gruesome, undeniable, impossible to ignore. Locals took to crossing to the other side of the road when passing it at night. Stories began to circulate almost immediately: that the cage rattled on its own, that the figure inside it moved, that La Corriveau herself was not entirely gone.
From Criminal to Legend
What is remarkable about La Corriveau is how quickly she passed from historical fact into folklore — and how the folklore kept growing. Within a generation, the stories around her had multiplied. By the 19th century, she had been credited with killing not two husbands but six or seven. She was said to be a witch. She was said to rise from her grave at night, riding on the backs of passers-by, forcing them to carry her across the St. Lawrence River to attend midnight dances with the dead.
The novelist Philippe Aubert de Gaspé père featured her memorably in Les Anciens Canadiens in 1863, in a famous scene set in a cemetery where the characters encounter La Corriveau's ghost. Louis Fréchette, Pierre-Georges Roy, and generations of Quebec writers, playwrights and composers have returned to her story ever since.
Today, historians tend to view La Corriveau with considerably more complexity than the legend allows. A French-speaking woman tried by an English military court, in a language she did not speak, for the murder of a man she claimed had abused her — the questions around whether she received a fair trial, and whether the punishment fit the crime, remain live ones.
The Cage Returns to Quebec
Here's a detail that closes the story in the most unexpected way. La Corriveau's iron cage disappeared from public record after its removal in 1763 — and then resurfaced, of all places, at Barnum's Museum in New York City in 1851, where it had been sold as a curiosity. After a long journey through various American collections, it was finally repatriated to Quebec and is now on display at the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City — a few hundred metres from where La Corriveau was tried, and not far from where she was hanged.
The cage outlasted the colony that built it, crossed the border and came back. La Corriveau, it seems, was never quite finished with Quebec City.
Discover It With Urban Horizons
The story of La Corriveau runs through some of the most historically significant streets in Old Quebec — from the Ursuline convent where she was tried to the Plains of Abraham where she was hanged. Our walking tours bring the real history of this city to life, including the darker chapters that most guidebooks leave out.
Ready to explore Quebec City through a local's eyes? Book your tour with Urban Horizons today.
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