His parents were separated in 1816, and Léon Faucher, who resisted his father's attempts to put him to a trade, helped to support himself and his mother during the rest of his school career by designing embroidery and needlework.

As a private tutor in Paris he continued his studies in the direction of archaeology and history, but with the revolution of 1830 he was drawn into active political journalism on the Liberal side.

He advocated a customs union between the Latin countries to counterbalance the German Zollverein, and in view of the impracticability of such a measure narrowed his proposal in 1842 to a customs union between France and Belgium.He helped to organize the Bordeaux association for free-trade propaganda, and it was as an advocate of free trade that he was elected in 1847 to the chamber of deputies for Reims.

[1] After the revolution of 1848 he entered the Constituent Assembly for the department of Marne, where he opposed many Republican measures – the limitation of the hours of labour, the creation of the national relief works in Paris, the abolition of the death penalty and others.

He had been to Italy in search of health in 1854, and was returning to Paris on business when he was seized by typhoid at Marseille, where he died.

[1] His miscellaneous writings were collected (2 vols., 1856) as Mélanges d'economie politique et de finance, and his speeches in the legislature are printed in vol.