Moreau de Saint-Méry: Itinerant Bibliophile

Abstract

This article examines the bookselling, printing, and editorial work of the French colonial lawyer Moreau de Saint-Méry. While residing in Philadelphia from 1794 to 1798, Moreau opened a bookstore and print shop that served as a publishing house and social community hub for his fellow refugees from the French and Haitian Revolutions. After examining the logistics of his involvement with the early North American book trade, I undertake a close reading of one of his imprints. The material history of this expertly crafted, multi-volume account of a Dutch trade mission to China highlights collaboration between European, Caribbean, American, and Chinese technicians and artists who lived migratory lives during the imperial conflicts of the late eighteenth century. The article considers Moreau’s professional book activities in light of his work as a collector whose personal collection of books, manuscripts, and maps became a cornerstone of the French colonial archives.

Keywords:

• Philadelphia bookseller
• Moreau de Saint-Méry
• early American printers
• Saint-Domingue
• Dutch in China
• French Revolution
• Haitian Revolution

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Library Company of Philadelphia for a Mellon summer fellowship that allowed me to study Moreau’s publications. Jim Green has been especially generous with his time over the years, and I appreciate his excellent comments on an earlier draft of the piece. Thanks are also due to Nicole Joniec for her assistance with the images.

Notes

1. The person to whom this declaration was made, the Comte de Moré, reportedly replied, ‘I was not so much surprised at this striking illustration of the freaks of fortune, as I was to see this little bourgeois suppose that he would startle posterity. I was not even more surprised to learn a few months later that he failed in business.’ Quoted in M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s American Journey, trans. and ed. by Kenneth and Anna Roberts (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1947), p. xix. This English translation is hereafter cited as Roberts. The original French edition is Voyage aux États-Unis de l’Amérique, ed. by Stewart Mims (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), hereafter cited as Mims. This journal of Moreau’s life from 1794 to 1798 is often cited for its rich depictions of both French exile culture and life in the early American republic. There is an increasingly large bibliography of French life in the early United States, and many titles are cited below. All translations from the French are mine, if not otherwise noted.

2. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Discours sur l’utilité du musée établi à Paris; Prononcé dans sa séance publique du 1er décembre 1784 (Parma: Bodoni, 1805), p. 23.

3. These examples are culled from Joseph Rosengarten, ‘Moreau de Saint Mery and his French Friends in the American Philosophical Society’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 50.199 (May–August 1911), 170; Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 31; Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793–1798 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), p. 2.

4. R. Darrell Meadows, ‘Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’, French Historical Studies, 23.1 (Winter 2000), 67–102. The article has an extensive discussion of personal and professional networks, including references to Moreau and the labourers in his store.

5. For a discussion of these valuable commodities to his store, see Roberts, pp. 177–78, and Mims, p. 193.

6. Moreau’s sense of himself as above the trade is comically and ironically captured in an exchange he notes about snobbery in Philadelphia. He writes, ‘Classes are sharply divided. This is especially noticeable at balls. There are some balls where no one is admitted unless his professional standing is up to a certain mark […] At one of the balls held on February 23, 1795, to celebrate the birthday of Washington, I begged Mr. Vaughan, my near neighbor, and my colleague in the Philosophical Society, to buy me one of the tickets of admission. But he replied that since I was a storekeeper I could not aspire to this honor […] And what did I say to him? “Don’t you know that I have never been more your equal than now, when I am nothing?”’ (Roberts, p. 333; Mims, p. 358). He was self-aware enough about his own snobbery to confess that such a comment was not likely to attain the desired result.

7. In his edited volume Idée générale ou abrégé des sciences et des arts à l’usage de la jeunesse (Philadelphia: Moreau, 1796), Moreau notes the value of l’imprimerie as follows: ‘C’est à la faveur de ce bel Art que les homes expriment leurs pensées dans des ouvrages qui ne peuvent être détruits que par le bouleversement de la nature. Il les répète avec promptitude, avec élégance, avec correction & presque à l’infini’ (pp. 143–44); of engraving he writes, ‘par la Gravure, nous préparons d’avance à ceux qui nous suivront, un amas presqu’intarissable de vérités, d’inventions, de formes, de moyens d’éterniser nos sciences & nos arts’ (pp. 145–46).

8. The complete title, which notes the presence of engravings and maps along with Van Braam’s qualifications as author, is Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollandaises, vers l’Empereur de la Chine, dans les années 1794 & 1795: où se trouve la description de plusieurs parties de la Chine inconnues aux Européens, & que cette ambassade à donné l’occasion de traverser: le tout tiré du journal d’André Everard van Braam Houckgeest, chef de la direction de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollandaises à la Chine, & second dans cette ambassade; ancien directeur de la Société des sciences & arts de Harlam en Hollande; de la Société philosophique de Philadelphie, &c. &c. Et orné de cartes & de gravures. Publié en français par M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Philadelphia: Moreau, 1797 and 1798).

9. There is a large bibliography on personal collectors who became benefactors of public and private institutions. For an overview of the topic, see ‘Private Libraries and Reading Tastes’ in the American Library Association’s American Library History: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature <http://www.ala.org/lhrt/popularresources/amerlibhis> [accessed 4 November 2014].

10. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoire Justificatif (Paris, 1790), p. 2.

11. For his collaborations with the Cercle des Philadelphes, see James McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

12. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoire Justificatif, p. 5.

13. Such was Moreau’s fame that his friend Beaumetz, another exile, informs him that a play or pantomime called The Bastille, or Liberty Triumphant was performed in New York on 25 June 1795 in which he was the leading character. John Hodgkinson, the renowned British American actor, played Moreau. See letter cited in Roberts, pp. 186–89.

14. M. Silvestre, Discours prononcé le 30 janvier 1819, lors de l’inhumation de M. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Membre de la Société (Paris, 1819), p. 4. François Fournier-Pescay, Discours prononcé aux obsèques de M. Moreau de Saint-Méry: le 30 janvier 1819 par M. Fournier-Pescay (Paris: Imprimerie de Madame Huzard, 1819), p. 10. See also L. G. Michaud’s Biographie des hommes vivants: ou, Histoire par ordre alphabétique de la vie publique de tous les … (Paris, 1818), pp. 502–03.

15. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoire Justificatif, p. 5.

16. Ibid., p. 34.

17. Several scholars have speculated about Moreau having a mixed-race daughter with his former mistress. For example, see Dominique Roger’s ‘Entre “Lumières” et préjugés: Moreau de Saint-Méry et les libres de couleur de la partie française de Saint-Domingue’, in Moreau de Saint-Méry et les ambiguïtés d’un créole des Lumières, ed. by Dominique Taffin (Fort-de-France: Société des Amis des Archives et de la Recherche sur le Patrimoine Culturel des Antilles, 2006), pp. 77–93, and chapter 4 of Marlene Daut’s forthcoming Tropics of Haiti: A Literary History of Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).

18. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoire Justificatif, p. 34, and Roberts, pp. 123, 44.

19. Thanks to Jim Green for helping me think through these observations and the ways in which Moreau’s business model may have borrowed and diverged from other booksellers’ strategies.

20. This advertisement is an unsourced newspaper clipping in Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, F3 201 ‘Historiques Saint-Domingue 1797–1798’. The same clipping advertises ‘A complete Printing office wherewith the publication of several works, whether in French, or in English may be undertaken at the same time’.

21. See George Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction: With a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library (New York: Wilson, 1940) and Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene (Dover, NJ: Dover Advance Press, 1953). For a discussion of French bookstores in the USA, including a detailed look at Moreau’s bookstore, see Albert Schinz, ‘La librairie française en Amérique au temps de Washington’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1917), 568–84.

22. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique et politique de la partie espagnole de l’isle Saint-Domingue; avec des observations générales sur le climat, la population, les productions, le caractère & les mœurs des habitans de cette colonie, & un tableau raisonné des différentes parties de son administration; accompagnée d’une nouvelle carte de la totalité de l’isle. Par M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, membre da la Société philosophique de Philadelphie. Tome premier[–second] (Philadelphia: Moreau, 1796–97), ii, 245.

23. François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 17.

24. James Alexander Dun, ‘“What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!’: Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 (July 2005), p. 480.

25. Catherine Hébert, ‘French Publications in Philadelphia in the Age of the French Revolution: A Bibliographical Essay’, Pennsylvania History, 58.1 (January 1991), 37–61. A discussion of the periodical press and the number of imprints is found on p. 38.

26. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Catalogue of books, stationary, engravings, mathematical instruments, maps, charts, and other goods of Moreau de St. Mery, & Co’s. store, no. 84, South Front-Street, corner of Walnut … (Philadelphia, 1795), p. 2.

27. Ibid., p. 12.

28. See Mathew Carey, Mathew Carey’s catalogue of books, &c. For sale, on the most reasonable terms at no. 118, Market-Street, near Fourth-Street, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1794), and Thomas Bradford, Bradford’s catalogue of books and stationary, wholesale & retail, for 1796. Country store-keepers supplied with all kinds of books and stationary at his wholesale and retail book & stationary store, South Front Street. no. 8 (Philadelphia, 1796).

29. For discussions of this literature, see Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996), and The Invention of Pornography, 1500–1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. by Lynn Hunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), especially Hunt’s essay contained therein.

30. See the entry on Frances Moore in Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, ed. by William H. New (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 158. An entry from March 1795 in Moreau’s journal notes the visit of M. Martial La Roque from Montreal. He writes, ‘How interesting I found him! How many things he was able to tell me about the country in which he has so long lived, about the conditions and sentiments of the French Canadians. What an interesting day for me, spiritually and emotionally’ (‘Combien je le trouvai intéressant. Combien il me dit de choses du pays qu’il habitait depuis longtemps, de la situation et des sentimens des français. Quelle intéressante journée pour mon esprit et pour mon coeur’: Roberts, p. 180; Mims, p. 196).

31. Alexandre de Batz and Ignace-François Broutin, ‘Plan du Camp des Nègres avec leur cabanes construites sur l’habitation de la Compagnie de pieux en terre couvertes d’Ecorsses, levez et déssiné sur les lieux le neuf janvier 1732’, 1732, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, F3 290/9.

32. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue; avec des observations générales sur le climat, la population, les productions, le caractère & les mœurs des habitans de cette colonie, & un tableau raisonné des différentes parties de son administration; accompagnée d’une nouvelle carte de la totalité de l’isle. Par M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, membre de la Société philosophique de Philadelphie (Philadelphia: Moreau, 1797–98).

33. Louis Narcisse Baudry Des Lozières, Second voyage à la Louisiane: faisant suite au premier de l’auteur de 1794–98: contenant la vie militaire du général Grondel, doyen des armées de France, qui commanda long-temps à la Louisiane, et honoré de cent dix ans de service : un détail sur les productions les plus advantageuses, les plus extraordinaires, de cette belle colonie, et sur ses quartiers les plus fertiles et les plus lucratifs : de nouvelles réflexions sur les colonies en général, et le régime nécessaire aux personnes des colonies pendant la première année de leur arrivée (Paris: Chez Charles, An xi, 1803), p. 400.

34. Louis Narcisse Baudry Des Lozières, Les égaremens du nigrophilisme (Paris: Chez Migneret, 1801).

35. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002).

36. For an example of how printers joined the mêlée, see Gaterau’s Réponse aux libelles séditieux publiés à Philadelphie contre les hommes de couleur de Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia: Parent, 1790). See also Catherine Hébert, ‘The French Element in Pennsylvania in the 1790s: The Francophone Immigrants’ Impact’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 108.4 (October 1984), 451–69.

37. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoire Justificatif, p. 2.

38. His work as editor predates his arrival in Philadelphia. For example, he notes elsewhere how he helped edit, and find a printer and proofreader for a pro-slavery tract back in 1785 (Mémoire Justificatif, p. 35).

39. See Catalogue des livres et manuscrits de la bibliothèque de feu M. Moreau de Saint-Méry … dont la vente se fera le mercredi 15 décembre 1819 (Paris: Merlin, November 1819), Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

40. Not surprisingly, the most comprehensive work on the bibliographic dimensions of Moreau’s work was done by a member of the Grolier club. See Henry Kent’s excellent ‘Chez Moreau de Saint-Mery, Philadelphie, with a List of Imprints Enlarged by George Parker Winship’, in Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames, ed. by G. P. Winship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), pp. 67–78, and ‘Encore Moreau de Saint-Méry’, in Bookmen’s Holiday: Notes and Studies Written and Gathered in Tribute to Harry Miller Lydenberg, ed. by Deoch Fulton (New York: New York Public Library, 1943), pp. 239–47. He also wrote a summary of the Van Braam–Moreau collaboration, ‘Van Braam Houckgeest, An Early American Collector’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 40 (1931), 159–74. Anthony Louis Elicona devotes several chapters to Moreau’s life in the United States in Un colonial sous la Révolution et en France et en Amérique: Moreau de Saint-Méry (Paris: Jouve & Companie, Editeurs, 1934), and biographical information is available in the introduction to the three-volume French reprint of the Description francaise, ed. by Blanche Maurel and Étienne Taillemite (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1958).

41. Pierre-Simon Fournier, Manuel typographique, tome ii (Paris, 1766), p. i.

42. Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994), pp. xvii–xviii.

43. The New York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860, ed. by George C. Groce and David H. Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 644.

44. Ibid., p. 570.

45. Kent, ‘Van Braam’, p. 168. See also Jean Gordon Lee, Philadelphians and the China Trade 1784–1844 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984); A. Owen Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).

46. For example, see Joseph-François de Cossigny’s Voyage à Canton, capitale de la province de ce nom, à la Chine; par Gorée, le Cap de Bonne Espérance, et les Isles de France et de la Réunion; suivi d’observations sur le voyage à la Chine, de Lord Macartney et du Citoyen Van-Braam, et d’une esquisse de arts des Indiens et des Chinois (Paris: Chez André, Imp.-Libraire, 1799), and Johann Gottfried Grohmann Moeurs et coutumes des Chinois, et leurs costumes en couleurs, d’après les tableaux de Pu Qùa, peintre à Canton, pour servir de suite aux Voyages de Macartney et de Van Braam / 60 planches avec le texte français et allemande/Gebräuche und Kleidungen der Chinesen dargestellt in bünten Gemälden von dem Mahler Pu-Quà in Canton, als Zusatz zu Macartneys und Van Braams Reisen / 60 Küpfer mit Erklärung in deutscher und französicher Sprache herausgegeben (Leipzig, 1800).

47. His Note des Travaux (Paris, 1799) states that ‘Il va mettre sous presse une histoire de Porto-Rico, traduite par lui de l’espagnol, et augmentée par ses propres recherches’ 1 vol 8; Une description de la Jamaïque, traduite de l’anglais par lui, 2 vol 8. Une traduction qu’il a faite du manuscrit espagnol de l’ouvrage de Don Felix d’Azara sur les quadrupèdes de Paraguay …’ (p. 7).

48. Moreau learns of the first incident from a friend in Paris who writes to tell him, ‘Vous avez encore fait une perte que vous ne connaissez pas encore. Le vaisseau Américain, qui apportait en France 500 exemplaires du voyage de Van Braam à la Chine que vous avez imprimé, a été pris par un de nos Corsaires. II parait que vos 500 exemplaires ont été confisqués avec le reste de la cargaison, et même vendus; car un Citoyen Monneron de Nantes est venu prendre communication dans ma Bibliothèque de cet ouvrage, le seul qui se trouvât à Paris, afin de voir si c’était le même livre, et il m’a appris qu’il n’était que le Commissionnaire de celui qui a acheté les 500 exemplaires à Nantes. Les lois n’autorisaient aucune réclamation.’ Of the second event he writes, ‘M. Van Braam expédia le 1er volume de son voyage dont j’étais l’éditeur, pour Angleterre, mais le bâtiment fut pris, et ce volume fut vendu en France. Garnery le publia en 2 volumes, in 8 et le vendit 6 fr.’ (Mims, pp. 255–56).

49. Fournier-Pescay, p. 11.

50. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Catalogue des livres et manuscrits de la bibliothèque de feu, p. 109.

51. The sale of his collection is discussed in Description francaise, ed. by Maurel and Taillemite, p. xxxii.

52. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Catalogue des Livres et manuscripts, pp. 102–04, 54.