Starting a military career at a young age, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent in 1757, at a time of increasing European involvement in the region through the activities of the French and English East India Companies.
He spent several years in India and authored memoirs, published posthumously, where he commented on the political situation of his time and the role of European powers in it, making him one of the first chroniclers of Indian-European relations.
Louis Laurent de Féderbe was a cultured and adventurous man, a lover of literature, a "specialist" in the East Indies, who knew how to discuss the problems of settlement and colonization with those well versed in the topic.
One of his daughters, Louise Marie Victoire Henriette, married Justin Bonaventure Morard de Galles on December 22, 1783 in Port Louis (Mauritius).
Following his death, his memoirs were sent to France alongside several other papers, where they remained in the National Library for around 200 years, until they were curated and published as a book in 1971, which was finally translated into English in 2023.
[1] In his memoirs, Féderbe recounts the political struggles for supremacy among the European Powers, the Maratha Confederacy, and various other actors, in the middle of the weakening and dissolution of the once dominant Mughal Empire.
Ruthlessly ambitious Europeans were no less deadly in these parts, as if Europe and America were too small a theatre of war for them to devour each other, pursuing chimeras of self-interest, and undertaking violent and unjust resolutions, they insisted on Asia too as the stage on which to act out their restless injustices.