After completing his secondary education in Collège Champittet, Switzerland, he studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence.
Brion wrote nearly a hundred books in his career, ranging from historical biography to examinations of Italian and German art, and turning later in life to novels.
His most famous collection of stories is the 1942 Les Escales de la Haute Nuit ("The Shore Leaves of the Deepest Night").
An essay of Brion appears in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the important 1929 critical appreciation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
[1] The 1982 television program The Romantic Spirit, which aired in the U.S. on the A&E (TV channel) from 1985–1991, credits Brion as having "devised" the series.