Fleury Mesplet

Who was Fleury Mesplet?

Fleury Mesplet was a French-born Canadian printer.

Born in Marseille and apprenticed in Lyon, he emigrated to London in 1773 where he set up shop in Covent Garden. In 1774 he emigrated to Philadelphia; it is thought that he may have been persuaded to do so by Benjamin Franklin. At Philadelphia he again went into business as a printer, but received little work; he printed the Lettre adressée aux habitants de la province de Québec, ci-devant le Canada for the Continental Congress in 1775, and travelled to Montreal the following year to set up a printing press in the newly captured city.

As the Americans withdrew from Montreal, he was arrested and imprisoned, but released later in the year; despite this, he managed to publish several works in 1776.

In 1778 he founded the Gazette Littéraire de Montréal, edited by Valentin Jautard. Both were arrested in 1779 for sedition, and imprisoned for three years; on his release, Mesplet was $5,000 in debt - yet he quickly dealt with his creditors, and in 1785, published La Gazette de Montréal, now the Montreal Gazette, the successor to the suspended Gazette Littéraire.

In total, he published some seventy or eighty works, in French, English, Latin and Iroquois; ten of these ran to more than a hundred pages, and another seven were almanacs.