He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, and returned there as director of studies in 1838, after some years spent in provincial schoolmasterships.

Upon the fall of the Empire, he took an active part in politics, was mayor of a district of Paris during the siege, and in 1871 was in the National Assembly, voting as a Moderate Liberal.

[1] While a noted freethinker in the 1850s and 1860s, later in life Vacherot felt remorse over the growth of atheistic anticlericalism and returned to both Catholicism and monarchism, receiving Catholic burial upon his death.

[3] Vacherot was a man of high character and adhered strictly to his principles, which were generally opposed to those of the party in power.

His chief philosophical importance consists in the fact that he was a leader in the attempt to revivify French philosophy by the new thought of Germany, to which he had been introduced by Victor Cousin, but of which he never had more than a second-hand knowledge.