He was born in Eure in northern France, and members of the family remained within the area for over a century.

The five sons of Louis François and Jacquette Pauline Hélène d’Aure held various positions within politics and the military, with two of them joining the Chamber of Deputies and one becoming Minister of Finance.

The children of the Passy siblings carried on the political and military connection, becoming Deputies or marrying into influential aristocratic families.

One member of the family, Frédéric Passy, was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize, and others became notable phoneticians.

[1]: 196  She was born into an aristocratic family: her brother was the Count d'Aure, a riding master under Louis XVIII.

[8]: 81  He was the secretary of the Société nationale d'Agriculture from 1884, and a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

[19]: 222–3 Marie Louise Pauline Salleron died in 1827, and Félix married Irma Moricet (his son's mother-in-law) in 1847.

[3]: 54  Alongside his peace work, he was Deputy for the 8th arrondissement of Paris,[3]: 49  and was a member of the Legion of Honour.

He began teaching English and German at the age of nineteen, and gained a doctorate in phonetics.

[26]: 21  Throughout his career he worked with and taught several influential phoneticians, and helped develop the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[26]: 21–2  After retiring from academia, he set out to follow a Christian Socialist lifestyle, living primitively until his death in 1940.

[20][28] Their daughter, Mathilde Paulian, climbed over the railings of the Eiffel Tower observation deck in February 1912 and fell to her death.

[14]: 256 A member of the family, Pierre Passy, is known to have lived at the Désert de Retz estate in the 1910s and 1920s.

[31][32] His second daughter, Suzanne Constance Blanche Passy, married Inner Temple barrister Miles Edward Hansell in September 1911.

[33]: 202 The Passy family first came into possession of the Eglise du couvent de Récollets in Gisors through Louis François, who obtainined it from the government.

[10] In 1856, Frédéric Passy acquired the Désert de Retz estate in Chambourcy from Jean-François Bayard.