Having trained as a Roman Catholic priest before the French Revolution, Latreille was imprisoned, and only regained his freedom after recognising a rare beetle species he found in the prison, Necrobia ruficollis.

Pierre André Latreille was born on 29 November 1762 in the town of Brive, then in the province of Limousin, as the illegitimate child of Jean Joseph Sahuguet d'Amarzit, général baron d'Espagnac, who never recognised him, and an unknown mother, who abandoned him at birth; the surname "Latreille" was formally granted to him in 1813, and derives from a nickname of unclear provenance.

[2] Even during his studies, Latreille had taken on an interest in natural history, visiting the Jardin du Roi planted by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and catching insects around Paris.

[2] After the fall of the Ancien Régime and the start of the French Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was declared in 1790, which required priests to swear an oath of allegiance to the state.

[3] The beetle had been described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775,[4] but recognising it had saved Latreille from likely demise, as all the other inmates were dead within one month.

He was briefly placed under house arrest in 1797, and his books were confiscated, but the influence of Georges Cuvier, Bernard Germain de Lacépède and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (who all held chairs of zoology at the recently instituted Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle) succeeded in freeing Latreille.

[2] In the following few years, Latreille was especially productive, producing important papers for the Mémoires du Muséum, all of the volume on arthropods for George Cuvier's Le Règne Animal ("The Animal Kingdom", 1817), and hundreds of entries in the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle on entomological subjects.

[9] His "eclectic method" of systematics incorporated evidence from all available characters without assuming a pre-defined goal; Latreille repeatedly dismissed anthropocentrism and teleology.

[2] As well as many species and countless genera, the names of many higher taxa are also attributable to Latreille, including Thysanura, Siphonaptera, Ostracoda, Stomatopoda, Xiphosura, and Myriapoda.