In 1807 Pradier left Geneva to work in Paris with his elder brother, an engraver. He won a Prix de Rome that enabled him to study in Rome from 1814 to 1818. He studied under Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Paris. In 1827 he became a member of the Académie des beaux-arts and a professor at the Ecole des beaux-arts. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pradier oversaw the finish of his sculptures himself. He was a friend of the Romantic poets Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, and his atelier was a center, presided over by his beautiful mistress, Julitte Drouet, who married Hugo in 1833.

The cool neoclassical surface finish of his sculptures are charged with an eroticism that their mythological themes can barely disguise. At the Salon of 1834, Pradier's Satyr and Bacchante created a scandalous sensation. Some claimed to recognize the features of the sculptor and his mistress, Juliette Drouet. When the prudish government of Louis-Philippe refused to purchase it, Count Anatole Demidoff bought it and took it to his palazzo in Florence. (It has come back to the Louvre).

Other famous sculptures by Pradier are the figures of Fame in the spandrels of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, and his twelve Victories inside the dome of the Invalides. Aside from large-scale sculptures Pradier collaborated with Froment-Meurice, designing jewelry in a 'Renaissance-Romantic' style.

He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Much of the contents of his studio were bought up after his death by the city museum of Geneva.

Pradier has been largely forgotten in modern times. In 1846 Gustave Flaubert said of him, however:

''This is a great artist, a true Greek, the most antique of all the moderns; a man who is distracted by nothing, not by politics, nor socialism, and who, like a true workman, sleeves rolled up, is there to do his task morning til night with the will to do well and the love of his art."

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