A native of Uzel in Brittany, he graduated as a civil engineer in 1872. His first assignment was the construction of various railway lines in the Mayenne area. In the course of this work, his left arm was crushed in a construction accident and had to be amputated. He relocated to Paris in 1886 and became chief engineer for the Paris Metro in 1896. He would supervise its construction for more than three decades, finally retiring on December 6, 1932.
The station Montparnasse-Bienvenüe of the Paris Metro was named after him. The naming ceremony took place in his presence on June 30, 1933; there was a famous last minute scramble to repaint the name boards of the station when it was discovered that the name Bienvenüe had been misspelled Bienvenue (without the diaeresis; French for "welcome") on all of them.