[1] His earliest concerns were with natural history and botany and his numismatic collection, but he became one of the small group forming the first architectural historians in France.
With the outbreak of the French Revolution, he joined other aristocratic émigrés, travelled in England and fought in the First Coalition or "Army of the Princes" and did not return until 1801, when he settled once again on his family estates at Gerville in Normandy and devoted his leisure to pursuing the local history of the Cotentin, from an antiquarian point of view.
In 1818 Duhérissier de Gerville used the expression ‘'romane’'— though in the sense of Romance languages[3]— in a letter to Auguste Le Prévost; Gerville's friend Arcisse de Caumont is more correctly accorded the honour of publicly applying, in French, the label Romane, i.e. "Romanesque" style to architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in his Essaie sur l'architecture du moyen âge, particulièrement en Normandie, 1824.
He encouraged a local man of Valognes, Léopold Victor Delisle by engaging him to copy manuscripts in his collection, and taught him enough of the basics of paleography that he was able to gain entrance to the École des Chartres in 1846, and pursue a distinguished scholarly career at the Bibliothèque nationale; he was a member of the general council for the département of La Manche, but withdrew at the time of the Revolution of 1830 and, a confirmed legitimist like others of the Antiquaires de la Normandie, refused the cross of the Légion d'honneur offered him under Louis Philippe.
Gerville published papers and antiquarian notes on the towns and Roman roads of the Cotentin peninsula, on Merovingian studies, and on Mont-Saint-Michel, which were collected as Études géographiques et historiques sur le département de la Manche, (Cherbourg 1854).