Count Potocki was born on 8 April 1895 in Szepetowka, a city located on the Huska River in Zaslavsky Uyezd, one of the subdivisions of the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire (today in Khmelnytskyi Oblast in western Ukraine).

[1] In 1914, Potocki was active in the Sanitary Aid Committee in Warsaw and, from 1915 to 1917, he served as a soldier in the Russian Army, later of the Polish Corps in the East (under General Eugeniusz de Henning-Michaelis).

On November 2, 1943, he was nominated as a Minister in Spain to replace Marian Szumlakowski, however, he refused to transfer parliamentary functions and Potocki took up his position in Madrid only on June 1, 1944, as chargé d'affaires he continued to be a delegate of the Polish Red Cross to Portugal.

In August 1919, the family's a Neo-baroque palace at Antoniny (which had been built in the 1870s by Austrian architects Fellner & Helmer) was burned to the ground in a fire set by Bolsheviks.

Under the terms of the March 1921 Peace of Riga (which ended the Polish–Soviet War), the Potocki brothers did not receive the ordynats promised to them.