Émile Gallé was born in Nancy on May 4, 1846, the only son of Charles Gallé (1818-1902) and Fanny Reinemer (1828-1891), who ran a crystal and porcelain business in Nancy. After an apprenticeship in different European cities, including Weimar and Meisenthal, Émile Gallé joined his father's earthenware and glassware trading and decoration business in 1867. He represented his father at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris, where he received an honourable mention for glassware, and at the 1872 Universal and International Exhibition in Lyon, where he won a gold medal in class 33 (porcelain and crystal). In 1875 he married Henriette Grimm (1848-1914), the daughter of a pastor in Bischwiller (Alsace), with whom he had four daughters.

In 1877, Emile Gallé took over the family business and extended his activities to cabinet-making in 1885. Having already made a name for himself at the Earth and Glass Exhibition in 1884, Émile Gallé received three awards for his ceramics, glassware and furniture (including a Grand Prix for his glassware at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889). On this occasion, Gallé was made an Officer of the Légion d’Honeur. From this date onwards, Gallé intensively developed his technical and aesthetic research into glasswork, a field in which he developed and created new manufacturing processes. His glassworks were designed in Meisenthal until 1894, when Gallé opened a crystal factory, which was fired on May 29 1894 at his factory in Nancy. His research led to the filing of two patents in 1898, for "a type of decoration and patina on crystal" and "a type of glass and crystal marquetry ".

His work, with its many references, expresses the diversity of Emile Gallé's interests, in which nature plays a dominant, but not exclusive, role. An artist as well as a botanist, Gallé was elected secretary of the Société Centrale d'Horticulture de Nancy in 1877.
Gallé’s patriotic and political commitments reached their peak at the Paris Universal Exhibitions in 1889 and 1900, with pieces such as the Le Rhin table (which called for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France) and spectacular installations such as Les Sept cruchesde Marjolaine (in favor of the rehabilitation of Dreyfus). In 1898, Gallé was a founding member and treasurer of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen in Nancy and, the following year, a founding member of the Université populaire. A Dreyfus supporter from the outset, he dedicated a number of talking glassworks (with a quotation engraved on the glass) to Captain Dreyfus’s cause, such as the Hommes Noirs vase and the Le Figuier chalice.

Committed to  the renewal of decorative arts from an early stage, Émile Gallé distributed quality mass-produced pieces through his French, English and German depots, thanks to the industrialization of its production. He opened sales depots in Frankfurt (1894) and London (1901), but his main dealer was Marcelin Daigueperce in Paris (1879) and then his son Albert Daigueperce in 1896.

In 1901, he was the founder and first president of the École de Nancy, the Alliance Provinciale des Industries d'Art, whose regulatory statutes he drew up.

When Émile Gallé died in 1904, his widow Henriette Gallé, assisted by her son-in-law Paul Perdrizet (1870-1938), took over the artistic and industrial activities of the glassworks. In 1908, she published Écrits pour l'art (Writings for Art), a collection of Gallé's main writings on botany and floriculture, as well as all his exhibition notices, speeches (including the Décor symbolique, delivered when Gallé was admitted to the Académie de Stanislas in 1900) and several articles on art and artists. Transformed into the Société anonyme des Établissements Gallé since 1927 it ceased glass production in 1931.

Created in 1904, the Museum of Decorative Art in Nancy bought thirty-eight glassworks from Gallé, shortly before his death.