He learned philosophy in the Jesuits' college at Poitiers, and in 1699 went to Bourges to study civil law and mathematics under the charge of an uncle, canon of La Sainte-Chapelle.

In 1710, he was named the chief editor of the Descriptions of the Arts and Trades, a major government project which resulted in the establishment of manufactures new to France and the revival of neglected industries.

Content with his ample private income, he requested that the money should go to the Académie des Sciences for the furtherance of experiments on improved industrial processes.

He loved retirement and lived at his country residences, including his chateau La Bermondière,[2] Saint-Julien-du-Terroux, Maine, where he had a serious fall from a horse, which led to his death.

Early in life he described the locomotor system of the Echinodermata, and showed that the supposed ability of replacing their lost limbs was actually true.

[4] In 1710 he wrote a paper on the possibility of spiders being used to produce silk, which was so celebrated at the time that the Kangxi Emperor of China had it translated into Chinese.

He elaborated a system of artificial incubation, and made important observations on the digestion of carnivorous and graminivorous (grass-eating) birds.

Among other important facts stated in this work are the experiments which enabled Réaumur to prove the correctness of Peyssonel's hypothesis, that corals are animals and not plants.