Cadet de Vaux was born in Paris on January 11, 1743, the youngest of seven boys. His father was Claude Cadet, first physician of Louis XIV of France. When his father died in 1745 Monsieur de Saint-Laurent, former General Treasurer of colonies, took responsibility for the family, making sure the children were well-educated.
Following the example of his older brother, Cadet de Vaux was apprenticed to the philanthropist Piarron de Chamousset.
In 1759 Cadet de Vaux replaced the elder Cadet as apothicaire-major at the Hôtel Royal des Invalides. From 1769 to 1781 he practiced pharmacy on the rue St. Antoine. In 1777 he became one of the cofounders of the first daily newspaper in Paris, Le journal de Paris, which threw its support during the Revolution to the Club des Feuillants and its leaders: Barnave, Lafayette, Bailly, André Chénier, and Mirabeau. This resulted in the sacking of the Journal offices in 1792 by Jacobin sympathizers. Many of Cadet de Vaux’s activities before the Revolution were concerned with the disinfection of cesspools and wells, the reform of sanitary conditions in prisons, industrial hygiene, and the removal of cemeteries from the center of Paris, particularly the Cimetière des Innocents.
In 1787 Cadet de Vaux and his brother Louis-Claude were elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society. Cadet de Vaux’s letters to Benjamin Franklin, now in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, reflect not only a friendship with Franklin, who then lived in Passy, but also some of Cadet de Vaux’s major interests at that time, such as Franklin’s stove, publication of correspondence by Franklin in the Journal de Paris, Montgolfier’s balloon, Indian corn, experiments on the preservation of wheat and flour, breadmaking, and the École de Boulangerie, which Cadet de Vaux and Parmentier had been instrumental in founding in 1780. Cadet de Vaux was active in local politics for a short time, serving from 1791 to 1792 as president of the department of Seine-et-Oise. His close friendship with Parmentier, who had succeeded him in 1766 at the Invalides, led to a fruitful collaboration over the years. In 1820 he was elected a member of the Academy of Medicine in Paris.
From the beginning of his career Cadet de Vaux had a strong interest in chemistry and science, which he sought to apply to such fields as agriculture, nutrition, and public health. In 1771 and 1772 he taught chemistry at the Royal Veterinary School in Alfort, and in 1770 he produced an annotated French translation of Jacob Reinbold Spielmann’s Institutiones chemiae. It was also primarily as a chemist that Cadet de Vaux, along with his colleagues Laborie and Parmentier, was invited by the French government to recommend safe methods for cleaning out cesspools, a hazardous occupation frequently resulting in workers being overcome, sometimes fatally, by noxious gases. Their findings, in which they recommended, among other things, the use of quicklime, a ventilator, and furnaces, were presented by Cadet de Vaux in 1788 before the Royal Academy of Sciences and reported on favorably the same year by Lavoisier, Milly, and Fougeroux de Bondaroy. In 1783 Cadet de Vaux and his two colleagues gave similar advice in connection with large-scale disinterments in the northern port city of Dunkerque. Chiefly because of his chemical expertise, Cadet de Vaux was admitted to membership in the Society of Agriculture in 1785; there, in 1789, he and Fourcroy jointly issued an enthusiastic report on Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie.
At the École de Boulangerie, where Cadet de Vaux and Parmentier were professors, their lectures dealt with such subjects as the analysis of wheat and flour, methods of preservation, and the technology of baking. In 1788 Cadet de Vaux purchased an estate in Fraconville, not far from Paris, where he spent most of the remaining forty years of his life. His multifarious projects during these four decades included agriculture (methods for preserving crops, prevention of mole infestation, cultivation of fruit and tobacco, extraction of sugar from sugar beets, and forest conservation) and home economics and nutrition (paints, steam laundries, disinfection of walls, wine-making, potato bread, coffee, gelatin and bouillon, and soup kitchens for the poor). A product of the Enlightenment, utilitarian in his scientific outlook, Cadet de Vaux numbered among his friends Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, and La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, with all of whom he shared many interests. Cadet de Vaux died on June 29, 1828.
Cadet was a member of the Academic Society of Sciences and a member of the Royal Agricultural Society of Paris from 1787.
Cadet de Vaux married Louise-Victoire Delaplace on 4 July 1773. He had known three sons - Benjamin, Charles-Antoine, and Marcellen.
