Born in 1837 in Khovrino, a suburb of Moscow, Guerrier was descended from Huguenot immigrants to Russia who had moved from Hamburg.

He received his secondary education in Moscow at the parish school of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Peter and Paul on Kozmodemyansk Street, now Starosadskiy Lane.

[3] Upon completing this course, he was retained by the university to prepare for a professorship, and at the same time he became a teacher of literature and history to the first Moscow Cadet Corps.

In 1862, he defended his master's thesis: The struggle for the Polish throne in 1733, and then travelled abroad, spending three years in Germany, Italy and Paris.

In 1879, Count Dmitry Tolstoy abolished the professors' disciplinary courts, but the subsequent University Statute of 1884 proved unworkable and had to be repealed.

Guerrier's concern for the education of women was primarily with training good conversationalists, mothers, and schoolteachers, and he advised one new class to avoid politics.

This charge, described in Guerrier's defence as "an absurd and malicious slander", caused a bitter division between two rival groups of women known as the 'politicians' and the 'academics'.

[19] In the 1870s, Russian liberals like Guerrier and Chicherin accused Karl Marx of being narrowly concerned with the proletariat and indifferent to the entrepreneur's more important "psychic labour".

In 1903, Guerrier and a colleague named Popov, as members of the City Duma, proposed that binding regulations were needed to control the exploitation of waiters and other catering staff by their employers.