Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry

Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (13 January 1750 – 28 January 1819) was a French lawyer, writer and politician. Born in Martinique in the commune of Fort-Royale, he spent his life in the French West Indies, France and the United States, and is best known for his writings on Saint-Domingue and Martinique. Moreau married into a well-positioned family, which allowed him to expand his connections in France and in time be elected as a member of the Parliament of France. Moreau was also a prominent advocate of proslavery thought in France. He owned slaves, was a freemason and a member of the Cercle des Philadelphes – a colonial scientific society – and sought to document life in the colonies. He was influenced by the scientific projects of the Enlightenment.

Writings Moreau produced in-depth studies of the colonies only years before St-Domingue's revolution. As such, he spent time traveling in the Caribbean and returning to France to write and lobby until his involvement with the French Revolution led to the issuing of a warrant for his arrest. His most notable work, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, which he wrote in 1789, has not been fully translated into English. This work develops an arithmetic theory of skin color and the epidermis for the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). It hierarchizes a possible one hundred and twenty-eight possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé). His work reflects a preoccupation of white colonists with racializing those who intermarry and interbreed with slaves or free gens de couleur, establishing the caste of white colonists as l'aristocratie de l’épiderme.

Politics A well-educated slave owner, he rejected the principle of the Natural Rights of Man in order to defend legal slavery and segregation on the basis of race. Moreau returned to France in 1788, where he became part of the Estates General which later renamed themselves the National Assembly. There he represented the planters in Saint-Domingue and supported slavery, confronting the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. He had an important position in the founding of the Museum of Paris which he was later appointed president of in 1787. After his return to France in 1798, after his exile in the United States, Moreau's first position was that of a historian in the Ministry of the Marine. A couple years later, in 1802 he became administrator of the Duchy of Parma, Piacenza, and Gustalla, but later on his position was taken away by Napoleon because of his forgiving response towards a criminal conspiracy among the army. Moreau became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1798, to which he was committed, and introduced many of his émigré friends into the Society as well. Moreau had to flee back to Paris in 1798, escaping the Alien Bill imposed by the American president at the time, John Adams.

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