Around 1762, at the age of twenty or twenty-one, he traveled to Spain to become a teacher of French at the Royal School of Ávila.
He published a French grammar for use by Hispanics which earned him to enter the Real Academia Española and receive the title of don Chantreau.
Back in France in 1782, he joined the revolutionary ideas and became an employee at the libraries section of the Committee of Public Instruction.
In 1792, he was appointed responsible for an investigation to the Spanish border, secret mission whose purpose was to ensure the feelings of Catalans to the French Revolution.
He was later a teacher of history at the école centrale in Auch in 1796, then at the l'École militaire, then based in Fontainebleau, in 1803[1] While his historical charts and chronologies quickly fell into oblivion, his lexicon of the words of the Revolution inspired Louis-Sébastien Mercier a Néologie ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux and his French grammar, of which several editions followed one another until 1926, was a milestone in the history of language teaching in Spain.