Charron was born in Paris and studied law and theology, the latter leading him to a teaching and pastoral career in the south of France. Engaged in the political-religious disputes in the time of the civil wars, he attacked the Protestant faith in Les trois véritez contre les athées, idolâtres, juifs, mahumétans, hérétiques et schismatiques (1593). The content of his lectures in Bordeaux and part of his sermons are gathered in his Discours chrétiens de la divinité (1604), where traditional theological themes are introduced in a broad manual of natural philosophy. His main work however is De la sagesse (1601–4), an anthropological Summa focused on skepticism that was inspired by Montaigne and supported by neo-Stoic themes.

A copy of De la sagesse was offered to Descartes in 1619 in Neuburg an der Donau by the Jesuit Johannes B. Molitor. At the time, Descartes was living in the Bavarian settlement in order to find the peace necessary for the meditation cited in the Discourse on Method. The echoes of reading Charron are traceable especially in his account of morality. Even the first rule of the provisional moral code resumes almost literally the title of a chapter from De la sagesse, “To obey and observe the laws, customs, and ceremonies of the country.” Like Charron, Descartes credits the necessity of unquestionable authority of customs and laws, not because they are good or bad but because they ensure civil peace. In the first rule of Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes claims that the object of sciences is not to be found among the diverse particular truths discovered by each discipline but in the “universal wisdom,” which is not of use for the Scholastic disputes but for guiding the will in all moments of life. Precisely this is the subject of De la sagesse, as stated in its preface: human wisdom, distinct from both the mundane and the divine. To attain it, science is indicated equally as an instrument and as an obstacle, if one focuses only on its particular results.