Abstract
<jats:p>Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry was born in Martinique in 1750. Educated in Paris, he became a judge in Santo Domingo and compiled a great treatise on the laws of the French West Indies. In Paris as a member of the colonial administration when the Revolution broke out, he participated as a moderate, holding office for a time as president of the Paris commune. But Robespierre’s accession to power drove Moreau, like other moderates, into exile.From 1794 to 1798 Moreau lived in Norfolk, New York, and Philadelphia, working first as a shipping clerk and then as printer and proprietor of a bookshop that became a center for the French émigrés in Philadelphia. In 1798 the return of the conservatives to power brought him back to France where he held a succession of offices and died in 1819.The journal from which Moreau hoped to compile a book was not published in his lifetime, and remained in manuscript until 1913 when it was rescued by Stewart L. Mims, who edited it under the title Voyage aux États-Unis de l’Amérique, 1793–1798.</jats:p>