He attended the lectures of Georges Cuvier, Brongniart, Jussieu, Prevost, Serres, Auduoin, and de Blainville.

When the king abdicated in 1830, Barrande accompanied the royal exiles to England and Scotland, and afterwards to Prague.

Settling in that city in 1831, he became occupied in engineering works, and his attention was then attracted to the fossils from the Lower Palaeozoic rocks of Bohemia.

[3] The publication in 1839 of Murchison's Silurian System incited Barrande to carry on systematic researches on the equivalent strata in Bohemia.

For ten years (1840–1850) he made a detailed study of these rocks, engaging workmen specially to collect fossils, and in this way he obtained upwards of 3500 species of graptolites, brachiopoda, mollusca, trilobites and fishes.

The first volume of his great work, Système silurien du centre de la Bohême (dealing with trilobites, several genera, including Deiphon, which he personally described), appeared in 1852; and from that date until 1881, he issued twenty-one quarto volumes of text and plates.

[12] His anti-evolutionary views were criticized by geologist Henry Hicks who commented that "Barrande is well known to be a determined opponent to the theory of evolution, and doubtless this strong bias has prevented him from seeing and accepting many facts which would otherwise, to so keen and careful an observer, have seemed inconsistent with such strong views.