He was born in the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, where his father was French consul. Together with his elder brother Charles he was educated in Paris at the collège Rollin. In 1844, he graduated as a doctor of medicine and doctor of science. In that same year, he was appointed to organize the new faculty of science at Besançon, where he acted as dean and professor of chemistry from 1845 to 1851. When he returned to Paris in the 1952 he succeeded Antoine Jérôme Balard at the École Normale, and in 1859 became professor at the Sorbonne in place of J. B. A. Dumas, for whom he had begun to lecture in 1853. He died at Boulogne-sur-Seine.