Consequently, dreaming to found an ideal and virtuous republic, it did not cease travelling, to America, to Holland, to Russia, to Poland, to Austria, to Germany, in the island of France (Mauritius). Returned in Paris (1771), it bound with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of which it was to remain always an enthusiastic disciple.

The first three volumes of its Studies of nature made it famous. Appointed intendant of the Botanical garden, he wrote of it the fourth and last volume, Paul and Virginia (1788), which devoted its literary fame (one saw in this history of a childish idyll, much of naivety, but also a biblical paraphrase, that of the episode of the genesis telling the lost paradise of Adam and Eve). Appointed professor at the Teacher training school under the French revolution, elected member of the Institute, it was filled honors by Napoleon.

A precursor of the romantic ones

Remarkable painter, Bernardin of Saint-Pierre inserted exoticism in the French literature, and could evoke the spectacles of exotic nature with a precision of detail and an unknown richness of vocabulary hitherto. By these new qualities as by its taste of the melancholy, it is already romantic and the precursor of the novelists of the XIX E century, who were to make a so broad place with picturesque description and the color.  

But, developing until excess the theories of Rousseau on the kindness and the harmony of nature, the generosity of Providence with regard to the man, the dangers of science and the social life, its last works (Harmony of nature, posthumous, 1815), encounter a too vast will of totalization of the world and its phenomena.