After his studies at the Lycée Henri-IV and in memory of his father, the General of the Empire, Victor Frédéric Chassériau, he was first destined for a career in arms and was received at the Schools of Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan in 1819.

On 3 April 1824, he was received as a pupil-titular of the Ecole des beaux-arts de Paris[1] He began the same year with Jacques Lacornée and François Édouard Picot and then in the office of his relative François Mazois, inspector of civil buildings, who had him collaborate in his work on the construction of the Cour des comptes that was to be decorated twenty years later by his cousin Théodore Chassériau, as well as in his work on the ruins of Pompeii.

Appointed chief architect of Algiers in 1849, Chassériau gave up his functions to build, on his plans, in this city, with the assistance of Mr. Sarlin and Mr. Ponsard, the theater which rises on the Bresson square.

Chassériau is known mainly as the author of the Boulevard de l'Impératrice and the seafront of Algiers which were inaugurated in 1865 by the emperor Napoleon III and the impératrice Eugénie.

His other relatives included the painter Théodore Chassériau, whose 1846 portrait of Charles Frédéric's wife Joséphine is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.