After studying with distinction at Périgueux, he entered the life guards of King Louis XVI of France, and was present at Versailles during the events of October 1789.

He entered politics and was part of the Conseil des Cinq Cents[3] in April, 1797; however, as he incurred the hostility of the Directory by his royalist sympathies he withdrew to his patrimonial inheritance of Grateloup, near Bergerac, where he avoided the excesses of the French Revolution[4] and where he devoted himself to philosophy.

Having been excluded from the Council of the Five Hundred on suspicion of royalism, he took part with his friend Joseph Lainé in the commission of 1813, which first expressed direct opposition to the will of the emperor Napoleon.

In his latter days his tendency to mysticism gradually brought him back towards practical Christianity, and he died a faithful child of the Catholic Church.

For it he proposed to substitute the genetic method, whereby human conscious experience might be exhibited as growing or developing from its essential basis in connection with external conditions.

Altogether Biran's work presents a very remarkable specimen of deep metaphysical thinking directed by preference to the psychological aspect of experience.

Up to 1804, a stage called by Naville "the philosophy of sensation", he was a follower of Condillac's sensism, as modified by de Tracy, which he soon abandoned in favour of a system based on an analysis of internal reflection.

In the second stage – the philosophy of will – 1804–18, to avoid materialism and fatalism, he embraced the doctrine of immediate apperception, showing that man knows himself and exterior things by the resistance to his effort.

Schopenhauer, claimed that "No one has carried this confusion, or rather identification, of natural force with cause so far as Maine de Biran in his Nouvelles considérations des rapports du physique au moral, since this is essential to his philosophy.