[2] Bonpland was born as Aimé Jacques Alexandre Goujaud[3] in La Rochelle, France, on 22,[4][1][3] 28,[5][6] or 29[citation needed] August 1773.

Their teachers included Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and René Louiche Desfontaines;[8] Aimé further studied under Jean-Nicolas Corvisart[4] and may have attended classes given by Pierre-Joseph Desault at the Hôtel-Dieu.

[4][7][9][3] Having befriended Alexander von Humboldt at Corvisart's house,[7] he joined him on a five-year journey to Tenerife and the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas,[10] traveling to what later became the independent states of Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico, as well as the Orinoco and Amazon basins, with a last stop in the United States.

[7] The Empress Josephine was very fond of him and installed him as superintendent over the gardens at Malmaison,[4][7] where many seeds he had brought from the Americas were cultivated.

[4] During this period, he also became acquainted with Gay-Lussac, Arago, and other eminent scientists and, after the abdication of Fontainebleau, vainly pleaded with Napoleon to retire to Venezuela.

"[13] The Paraguayans therefore destroyed the colony on December 8, 1821, and Bonpland was arrested as a spy and detained at Santa Maria, Paraguay[14] until 1829.

[9] At the same epoch, the Swiss naturalist Johann Rudolph Rengger also stayed in Paraguay: he was not allowed to cross the strictly guarded border, but was free to circulate pending the request of a special permit for each excursion.

[4] His collection of plant specimens deposited in Paris at the National Museum of Natural History, France was curated by Alicia Lourteig.

[21] A fictionalized account of his travels with Humboldt occurs in Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt, translated by Carol Brown Janeway as Measuring the World: A Novel.