town, residential southeastern suburb of Paris, Val-de-Marne département, Île-de-France région, north-central France. The town lies on a loop of the Marne River. The locality received its name from the abbey founded there in the 7th century by Benedictine monks from Saint-Maur-sur-le-Loire, who had fled from the Norman invaders. The abbey became powerful in the Middle Ages but was secularized in the 16th century. It was destroyed in 1793 during the upheavals of the French Revolution. Saint-Maur is separated from Paris by the Vincennes Forest but is linked to the capital city by a regional express railway network. The area within the peninsula formed by the Marne's loop was developed as a garden suburb in the 1830s and has retained its character in spite of the urban spread around it. Pop. (1999) 73,069; (2005 est.) 75,200.