Медирик Луи Эли Моро де Сен-Мери: Колонист и теоретик расового неравенства

French Creole colonist

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 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). His work reflects a preoccupation of white colonists on 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.

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 named themselves as 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 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 Societey in 1798, to which he was committed and introduced many of his emigres friends into the Society as well. Moreau had to escape back to Paris in 1798 escaping the Alien Bill imposed by the American president at the time, John Adams.