The son of a curator of the Museum of
Angoulême, he became a military surgeon and reached the rank of adjutant in 1870. After obtaining his doctorate in 1874, he travelled to
Saint-Louis in Senegal. In 1878, he joined the
Muséum national d'histoire naturelle as an assistant in the Laboratory of
Anthropology, and then replaced Victor Bertin (1849–1880), as assistant naturalist in the Laboratory of
molluscs,
worms and
zoophytes, after Bertin's death. He held this post until his retirement in 1911. He addressed, in one hundred fifty publications, to a variety of subjects: from
geology to
paleontology, botany to malacology. These include his 1860 catalogue of wild flowering plants in the
Department of Charente, co-written with Savatier Alexander. From 1882 to 1883, Rochebrune took part in a scientific expedition to the
Southern Ocean and
Cape Horn, with the malacologist
Jules François Mabille, during which they collected, and later described many new species of molluscs. In 1889, Rochebrune published reports on his extensive research. Much of Rochebrune's subsequent research was on the growth of
shellfish. Rochebrune was also the discoverer of a lamp from the
Paleolithic era, in the caves of
La Chaire a Calvin in
Charente. ==Taxa named==