After finishing high school in Marseille, he followed the faculty of letters to Aix and Toulouse, taking his license in philology in 1920.
In 1924, urged by Mario Roques, professor at the Sorbonne, Jean Boutière choose his doctoral thesis the life and works of Ion Creangă, a Romanian novelist.
To complete it, enter into a contract with the French teacher G. T. Kirileanu, Artur Gorovei, D. Furtună, Garabet Ibrăileanu, maintained a close correspondence, and they supplied many documents and testimonies about Ion Creangă.
The first major monograph about Ion Creangă was printed in Paris in 1930, having been well received not only in France but also in Romania, where, in 1932, in the report compiled by Mihail Sadoveanu, volume was crowned with the Romanian Academy Award.
Boutiére returned to France in 1922, and left to replace J. Linard at Oradea, while he functioned as a teacher at Coeneille in Rouen, then as the head of the department of the Romanian language at the National School of Oriental Languages, and finally as the successor of Mario Roques at the Sorbonne.