Marochetti was born in Italy and was ennobled by the Kingdom of Sardinia but lived and worked in France, creating a number of prestigious works for the royalist French government in the 1830s. He made his name by creating equestrian statues; one, of the Duke of Wellington, was erected in Glasgow in 1840. By the 1840s, however, his popularity in continental Europe was in decline. The French Revolution of 1848, which saw the final overthrow of the French monarchy, prompted him to resettle in London and seek new patrons among the British elite.