Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry
Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (13 January 1750 – 28 January 1819), son of Bertrand-Médéric and Marie-Rose Moreau de Saint-Méry, was born in Fort-Royale, Martinique. He was a lawyer and writer with a career in public office in France, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti). He is best known for his publications on Saint Domingue and Martinique. He married into a well-positioned family which allowed him to expand his connections among French people and in time, positioned himself as a member of the Parliament of France. Moreau was deeply involved in the founding of the Museum of Paris which he was later appointed president of in 1787. Although he did not come from a family of significant means, Moreau used the inheritance he received from his grandfather to study law in Paris. There, he argued that colonial law, drafted in France, was not fitting for the realities of the French Caribbean. 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. 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).
