Jules Storme was born in 1887 in Gentbrugge, near the city of Ghent, the son of Marcel Storme, an intellectual who had not been able to receive a higher education and had compensated by becoming very active as founder, president, and board member of many local and regional Catholic organizations. Jules went to grammar school in Ghent and studied at the university there. He started at the Arts faculty, where he obtained a doctorate with a thesis on the dictionary in Dutch of the sixteenth-century humanist Cornelis Kiliaan, for which the Royal Flemish Academy of Dutch language and literature awarded him a prize. Although he could easily have become a philologist, Jules Storme studied law in Ghent and also went abroad in order to develop himself. In 1915 he obtained his doctorate in law, but although he was only an apprentice lawyer during the war, he had already made an impression, as some people wanted to recommend him for a chair at the ‘von Bissing University’. However, Jules Storme himself did not want to be associated with this institution established by the German occupiers in Ghent.