Pierre René Célestin Moreau, born in the Château du Bois-D'Aix (Abilly, Indre-et-Loire) on 23 March 1805, studied law in Paris, then gave up a career as a magistrate to defend the legitimist cause as a journalist. In 1831, Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie took him on as assistant director of Le Rénovateur. When Le Rénovateur merged with La Quotidienne, he took Joseph-François Michaud's place as chief editor. In 1848, he became a political editor of L'Union, a paper formed by the merger of La Quotidienne, La France and L'Echo français. In 1840-1850, he also wrote the literary column in the Catholic magazine Le Correspondant. At the same time, he published seventeenth-century memoirs with Janet et Techener and compiled a bibliography of Mazarinades for the Société de l'Histoire de France. In 1846, he married Marie-Anne Clémentine Vattemare, the daughter of Alexandre Vattemare (1796-1864), the promoter of a system of international exchanges which led to the creation of numerous American public libraries. In 1866, Célestin Moreau left L'Union and retired to the provinces. He died on 12 February 1882. His archives remained in the family for many years and were finally given to the Mazarine in 2009 by the Friends of Alexandre Vattemare.
The collection contains dossiers, manuscripts of articles or prefaces to editions of texts which are now in the Mazarine's general collection. His correspondence (450 letters from over 100 correspondents) gives a glimpse of a complex social network combining work, scholarly activities and royalist friendships.
The entire collection is listed in detail in Calames.