He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg (since 1871, part of the German Empire).
However, he was disappointed that the school did not offer the subjects he wanted, and so he enrolled at the École des langues orientales to study Arabic and at the École pratique des hautes études for philology, general linguistics, Egyptology, Ancient Arabic, primitive religions and Islamic culture.
From 1912 to 1915, he held the Chair of Ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland but was expelled for expressing doubts about the neutrality of Switzerland during World War I.
[citation needed] There he reorganized the museum and organized the first ethnographic conference (1914).
His best-known work is Les rites de passage (The Rites of Passage, 1909), which includes his vision of rites of passage rituals as being divided into three phases: préliminaire or "preliminary", liminaire or "liminality" (a stage much studied by the anthropologist Victor Turner), and postliminaire or "post-liminality".