By considerable sacrifice he was enabled to attend a seminary at Vannes, and worked briefly as usher in a school before, in 1833, he became a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

He helped Cousin, without receiving any recognition, in his translations from Plato and Aristotle, and in 1839 became his deputy in the chair of philosophy at the University of Paris, with the meagre salary of 83 francs per month.

[2] At this period he edited the works of Nicolas Malebranche (2 vols, 1842), of René Descartes (1842), Bossuet (1842) and of Antoine Arnauld (1843), and in 1844–1845 appeared the two volumes of his Histoire de l'école d'Alexandrie.

His refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the government of Louis Napoleon after the coup d'état was followed by his dismissal from his professorship, and he devoted himself to philosophical and political writings of a popular order.

[2] In 1863 he was returned to the Corps Législatif for the 8th circonscription of the Seine département, and supported "les Cinq" (Darimon, Favre, Hénon, Ollivier and Picard) in their opposition to the government.

He was regarded by the monarchical right as one of the most dangerous obstacles in the way of a restoration, which he did as much as any man (except perhaps the comte de Chambord himself) to prevent, but by the extreme left he was distrusted for his moderate views, and Gambetta never forgave his victory at Bordeaux.

He replaced anti-republican functionaries in the civil service by republicans, and held his own until 3 May 1877, when he adopted a motion carried by a large majority in the Chamber inviting the cabinet to use all means for the repression of clerical agitation.

[citation needed] The rejection (1880) of article 7 of Ferry's Education Act, by which the profession of teaching would have been forbidden to members of non-authorized congregations, was due to his intervention.