Under the influence of the philosopher Elme Marie Caro and of Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry's book Les Sources, Ollé-Laprune, after exceptionally brilliant studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1858 to 1861), devoted himself to philosophy.
Theodore de Regnon, the Jesuit theologian, wrote to him: The Government of the Third Republic was now and then urged by a certain section of the press to punish the "clericalism" of Ollé-Laprune, but the repute of his philosophical teaching protected him.
Some months after his death William P. Coyne called him "the greatest Catholic layman who has appeared in France since Ozanam" ("New Ireland Review", June, 1899, p. 195).
In his "Essai sur la morale d'Aristote" (1881) Ollé-Laprune defended the "Eudaemonism" of the Greek philosopher against the Kantian theories; and in "La philosophie et le temps présent" (1890) he vindicated, against deistic spiritualism, the right of the Christian thinker to go beyond the data of "natural religion" and illuminate philosophy by the data of revealed religion.
Victor Delbos of the University of Paris published in 1907 the course which Ollé-Laprune had given on reason and rationalism (La raison et le rationalisme).