Born into a Jansenist family, Étienne and his mother, who knew Latin, had to go into hiding in the countryside when his father, a clothing merchant made a member of the French nobility by king Louis XV of France with the mention by the king to continue in his trading and shop keeping however, was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution.[1] Later he studied Arabic under Silvestre de Sacy, (1758–1838), a member of the French nobility since 1813 and the son of a public notary with Jewish roots, becoming later a rector at the University of Paris, in the School of Living Oriental Languages.[1]