His father was chief of the bureau of correspondence in the Department of Foreign Affairs for the French monarchy, and it was as an interpreter attached to that bureau that the son began his career in 1775.

While still a youth, he gained literary distinction by his translations of historical works from Swedish into French.

Genet was successively attached to the French Embassies at Berlin and Vienna, and in 1781 he succeeded his father in the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In 1788, he was Secretary of the French Embassy at St.Petersburg, where his zeal for French Revolutionary principles so irritated the Empress Catherine that she characterized him as "a furious demagogue," and in 1792 he was forced to leave Russia.

In the same year he was named Ambassador to Holland, and thence was soon transferred to the United States.
It is obvious that a man of such experience could not be ignorant of diplomatic forms and of international proprieties of behavior.