The son of artist and mapmaker Ambroise Tardieu, he achieved his Doctorate in Medicine at the Faculté de Médecine of Paris.

Using his cases as a statistical base, Tardieu wrote over a dozen volumes of forensic analysis, covering such diverse areas as abortion, drowning, hanging, insanity, homosexuality, poisoning, suffocation, syphilis, and tattoos.

[3] He also wrote a pioneering study on maltreatment against children and he published on the terrible working conditions of young boys and girls in mines and factories.

[4] Though Tardieu's textbook on the legal medicine of poisoning was the work that did most to establish him as an authority in his time, for the posterity he is most famous for his forensic study of sexual crimes: Etude Médico-Légale sur les Attentats aux Mœurs.

[5][6] The study consists of three parts: the first deals with indecent exposures, the second with rape and the third with "pederasty" (sexual relations between an older and a younger man).

[citation needed] His work Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs is still used by Egypt as a basis for medical tests to determine if a person is homosexual.