Baraguey d'Hilliers served as a second lieutenant in the Russian campaign of 1812, and in 1813 was an aide-de-camp to Marshal Marmont at the Battle of Leipzig, where he lost his left hand.

[3] He was then appointed commander-in-chief of the French troops that invaded the revolutionary Roman Republic, in 1849, in the context of the First Italian War of Independence.

[1] In 1851, he replaced as commander of the army of Paris Nicolas Changarnier, whom President Napoleon Louis Bonaparte distrusted, and was a supporter of the latter's coup d'état later in that year.

After capturing Bomarsund, Baraguey d'Hilliers was promoted to Marshal of France and made a Senator of the French Second Empire.

After the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Adolphe Thiers made him president of a commission investigating the causes of the French defeat.