Although intended for the priesthood, due to the Revolution Péron reluctantly joined the 2nd Allier Volunteer Battalion in 1792 and helped defend besieged Landau.

[1] In 1800, after an unhappy love affair, he sought to join Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australian waters as an anthropological observer.

When Stanislas Levillain and René Maugé died, Péron rose to prominence as the sole remaining zoologist.

With the aid of the artist Charles Alexandre Lesueur, Péron was largely responsible for gathering some 100,000 zoological specimens—the most comprehensive Australian natural history collection to date.

Although he died before he could fully study his specimens, Péron made a major contribution to the foundations of the natural sciences in Australia and was a prescient ecological thinker.

As a Corresponding Member of the Société des observateurs de l'homme, Péron wrote a great deal about the Tasmanian Aborigines of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, on south-eastern Tasmania.

The Australian historian Edward Duyker has shown that he has been unfairly accused of polygenism and racism, mainly because of a mistranslation of extracts from one of his scientific papers.

[citation needed] Baudin died before he could return to France, and it was Péron who began writing the official account of the expedition: Journey of Discovery to the Southern Lands [fr ] (Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes).

In doing so, he committed a great injustice to his former commander's memory by magnifying his faults and frequently distorting the historical record.

[contradictory] In the wake of the resumed fighting between France and Britain, Péron also drafted a secret Memo on English settlements in New Holland (Mémoire sur les établissements anglais à la Nouvelle Hollande), which advocated a French conquest of Port Jackson with the aid of rebellious Irish convicts.

—— Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, by François Péron, continued by Louis de Freycinet, 2nd edn 1824: Book IV, Comprising Chapters XXII to XXXIV (trans.

—— ‘Inventaire général de tous les objets relatifs à l’histoire de l’homme recueillis pendant le cours de l’expédition ou remis à M. Péron, naturaliste zoologiste du Gouvernement dans cette expédition, et présentés par M. Geoffroy et lui à Sa Majesté l’Impératrice Joséphine le 9 prairial an XII [29 May 1804]’ in Copans, J. and Jamin, J.

—— ‘Mémoire sur le nouveau genre Pyrosoma’, Annales du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, tome 4, an XII (1804), pp.

123–48 [English translation: ‘Fragment from Peron, with notices from other voyagers, on the Temperature of the Sea, at great depths, far from Land’, American Journal of Science, vol.

Péron, F. and Lesueur, C.-A., ‘Observations sur le tablier des femmes Hottentotes, avec une note sur l’expédition française aux Terres Australes, et une étude critique sur la stéatopygie et le tablier des femmes Boschimanes, par le Dr Raphaël Blanchard’, Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France, vol.

—— ‘Notice sur l’habitation des animaux marins’, Annales du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, tome 15, 1810, pp. 287–92.

—— ‘Notice sur l’habitation des phoques’, Annales du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, tome 15, 1810, pp. 293–00.