 He studied at the École Nationale des Chartes, a college for prospective archivists and librarians.After writing his 1972 thesis about heraldic bestiaries in the Middle Ages, he worked in the coins, medals and antiquities department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France until 1982.Since 1983 he has held the Chair of History of Western Symbolism ("Chaire d'histoire de la symbolique occidentale") and is a director of studies at the Sorbonne's "École pratique des hautes études".