His first work was a poem on Joan of Arc (1804); but he wrote at the same time a Grammaire général synthétique, which attracted the attention of J. M. de Gérando, then secretary-general to the ministry of the interior.
While spending a part of his time writing vaudevilles and comic operas, he began to collect old essays and rare pamphlets by old French historians.
[1] Towards the end of Villèle's ministry, when there was a movement of public opinion in favour of extending municipal liberties, Leber undertook the defence of the threatened system of centralization, and composed, in answer to François Raynouard, an Histoire critique du pouvoir municipal depuis l'origine de la monarchie jusqu'à nos jours (1828).
He also wrote a treatise entitled De l'état réel de la presse et des pamphlets depuis François Ier jusqu'à Louis XIV (1834), in which be refuted an empty paradox of Charles Nodier, who had tried to prove that the press had never been, and could never be, so free as under the Grand Monarch.
[1] In 1832 Leber had been elected as a member of the Societé des Antiquaires de France, and in the Bulletin of this society (vol.