He was the youngest of five children of Jacques Dominique, Comte de Cassini, famous for completing the map of France, who had succeeded his father as the director of the Paris Observatory.

The genus Cassinia was named in his honour by the botanist Robert Brown.

He named many flowering plants and new genera in the sunflower family (Asteraceae), many of them from North America.

He published 65 papers and 11 reviews in the [Nouveau] Bulletin des Sciences of the Société Philomatique de Paris between 1812 and 1821.

In 1825, Cassini placed the North American taxa of Prenanthes (family Asteraceae, tribe Lactuceae) in a new genus Nabalus.