After studying in the colleges of Marseille and Avignon, Chaudon decided to become an ecclesiastic, and was admitted to the order of Saint Benedict at Cluny.
Old age was drawing on; his sight was failing, his health was feeble, but he secured the esteem of his new neighbors, who begged permission to place his portrait in the hall of the mairie.
His earliest essays were poetical, but after the publication of an Ode sur la Calomnie, (1756), and another addressed to the Échevins de Marseille (1757), he perceived that his forte lay in history and biography.
He published in 1766 the Nouveau Dictionnaire Historique, a biographical dictionary in 4 vols., designed to be equally removed from the prolixity of Louis Moréri and the dryness of Jean-Baptiste Ladvocat, with the imprint of Amsterdam, and professing to be the production of a "société de gens de lettres," but which, in fact, proceeded exclusively from the pen of Chaudon, and was published at Paris.
(1804), in which Chaudon, who had been for some time blind, was assisted by Antoine-François Delandine, who wrote the lives of the revolutionists, the two names being associated on the title page.