Quicherat was educated at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe and completed his studies at the École des Chartes in 1835. Following work with the Bibliothèque Royale, he returned in 1847 to the École des Chartes and became its director in 1871.

Quicherat was one of the founders of the study of archaeology in France. He also researched and wrote extensively on medieval France, producing biographies of the historians Jean Castel and Bishop Thomas Basin of Lisieux as well as studies of Charles VII and Louis XI. He edited and published the texts of the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc in five volumes (1841–49). The posthumous publication of Quicherat's two-volume study synthesizing archaeology and the study of history demonstrated the wide range of his scholarship.