Franz Baumann was born in Schramberg, where he received his Abitur in 1973 from Gymnasium Schramberg. He then studied social sciences and management at the University of Konstanz, specializing in international management, and in 1975 studied history of art at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. He obtained his degree in public administration in 1979 from the University of Konstanz and went on to obtain a doctorate in political science in 1992 from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His wife, Barbara Gibson, is a Canadian diplomat. She served from 2004 to 2008 as ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, in 2015 as deputy secretary-general and in 2016 as secretary-general of ICM, the Independent Commission on Multilateralism (ICM) in New York. Their daughter was born in 2000.