Philippe was born in 1832 and worked as a porter in the markets and warehouses of Paris. He had served in the army in Algeria and had a record of violence.
Between 1862 and 1866 he killed at least eight people in Paris, seven women working as prostitutes and one child of about ten. He cut their throats, and he robbed them. The killings were spread across several quarters of the city and were not connected for years.
He was arrested on January 11, 1866, two days after the last killing, on evidence from a surviving victim. He was tried, convicted, and guillotined in July 1866. The court's language was of homicidal mania, which was the frame nineteenth-century French forensic medicine used for cases of this kind.
The case was resurrected in the London press in October 1888, during the Whitechapel murders, as an example of a man who had done the same thing in a European capital and been caught. That is how the case entered English-language crime writing, and most of what circulates in English about Philippe descends from those 1888 newspaper articles rather than from the French trial record.