Along his professors at Paris were Abbé John Logan, who remained throughout life the inspirer and mentor of his studies and Abbe Le Hir, who initiated him and his fellow disciple Fulcran Vigouroux into Biblical science, to which they devoted their lives.
[1] He was ordained priest in 1861 and entered the "Solitude", the novitiate of the Sulpicians, but left on account of illness after several months without joining the society.
His piety drawing him to sacred sciences, he was appointed by the State (1876) to the chair of Holy Scripture in the faculty of theology at Rouen; he continued however to reside at Bois-Guillaume and to share in the duty of governing the student-body.
All these books form part of one grand work, Les Origines de l'Eglise, which Fouard wrote as an answer to the presentation of the same subject by Ernest Renan, who like himself had seen a pupil of le Hir.
[1] Each successive book of the Abbé Fouard immediately gained a wide popularity and was translated into nearly all the language of Europe.