René-Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon was born in Blois on November 15, to architect Jean-Baptiste and his second wife Anna-Leontine Jolly. He spent his youth in Blois where he attended the religious institute Notre-Dame des Aydes and later the Augustin-Thierry College.

After passing the bachelorship in Philosophy and Mathematics, in October he moved to Paris, where he started a degree course in Mathematics at the Rollin College.

He stopped his university studies, probably because of his health problems and was considered unfit for military service. He also became involved in occultism and in this period was initiated into free masonry.

His first articles were published in the periodical "La Gnose" with the pseudonymous Palingenius. This collaboration went on until 1912. In the same period he started to be interested in the Taoist, Hindu and Islamic traditions.

After being initiated into Islam he changed his name to Abdel Wahed Yahia (which means “Servant of the One). On July 17 he married Berthe Loury in Blois in a Catholic ceremony and they went to live with his aunt and niece in rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile in Paris.

He collaborated with the Catholic periodical "La France Antimaçonnique", under pseudonym The Sphinx.

Guénon graduated in Literature.

After getting a diploma in the Advanced Study of Philosophy, with a thesis on the Examen des idées de Leibnitz sur la signification du calcul infinitesimal, he started teaching Philosophy in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

He moved to Setif in Algeria in order to keep on teaching.

He was asked to teach Philosophy at the college in Blois.

Guénon decided to stop teaching in order to concentrate on his studies.

He proposed for his doctorate in Literature a thesis about Hindu doctrines approved by Sylvain Lévi, but it was refused through opposition of the dean Brunot. The work was published with the title Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues and consequently he published Le Théosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-religion, in which exposed the impostures of the Theosophical Society.

Guénon published L'Erreur spirite, where he refuted Spiritism, very popular at the time.

After publishing Orient et Occident, an attempt to establish guidelines for an agreement between western and eastern intellectual elites, Guénon began teaching Philosophy again in Cours Saint-Louis.

Guénon started writing for two periodicals: catholic "Regnabit" and "Le Voile d'Isis". He also published L'Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta and L'Esotérisme de Dante and lectured at the Sorbone on La Métaphysique orientale.

In one burst he wrote La Crise du monde moderne, in reply to Henri Massis’s La Défense de l'Occident, published in 1926. Guénon published Le Roi du monde in the same year.

On January 15 his wife died from meningitis. In October his aunt Mme Duru, who had lived with them, died as well. The same year Guénon set out the philosophy of the periodical "Le Voile d'Isis".

His niece, whom he had brought up as a daughter, was taken back by her mother. He became phisically and intellectually alone. The same year he published Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel and a short pamphlet Saint Bernard.

On March 5 he left for Cairo to study the Sufi tradition for Vega Publishers. Although this project was abandoned he stayed in Egypt and kept writing for "Le Voile d'Isis".

Le symbolisme de la Croix was published.

It was published Les états multiples de l'être, a work intended to outline the contents of his metaphysics.

Guénon married Fatma, daughter of sheik Mohammad Ibrahim and from this marriage he had four children. In the same year he contributed to "Diorama filosofico" the section edited by Evola in the newspaper "il Regime Fascista".

The periodical "Le Voile d'Isis" changed its name to "Études Traditionnelles", under Guénon’s intellectual guidance. The issue of this periodical was interrupted between 1940 and 1945.

Le Regne de la quantité et les signes des Temps was published for the series "Tradiction” Gallimard Publishers.

Gallimard published again La Crise du monde moderne together with a work dedicated to mathematics Les Principes du calcul infinitésimal. Guénon also edited a collection of his own articles about initiation entitled Aperçus sur l'initiation. The same year he published an essay about Symbolism in the Far East La Grande Triade.

Second edition of Orient et Occident was published.

On January 7, after three months of sickness, René Guénon died, just when his work had started arousing interest in the “traditional point of view” an outline of which he had devoted his own life to. His body was buried in Darassa’s cemetery, according to the Muslim rite.