Cécilia Attias

Cecilia Attias was born Cécilia María Sara Isabel Ciganer-Albéniz. Her father, André (Aron) Ciganer, was a Moldovan immigrant born in Bălți, Bessarabia in 1898 of Russian-Jewish lineage. He left home at the age of 13, just before the First World War. Ciganer moved to Paris, where he became a furrier. In 1937, he converted to Catholicism and married Spanish-Belgian Diane Albéniz de Swert, a daughter of Alfonso Albéniz Jordana, a Spanish diplomat who played with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in the early 1900s. and a Belgian mother. Her maternal great-grandfather was the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz.

Cécilia Sarkozy Attias has three older brothers:

Patrick Ciganer-Albeniz is a program executive officer of the Integrative Financial Management Program of NASA.

Christian Ciganer-Albéniz is a consultant for companies such as Framatome, AXA, Lagardère, Crédit Foncier, Accor, and Aurel Conseil.

Ivan Antoine Ciganer-Albéniz

Her mother's half-brothers and half-sisters, as well as their descendants, belong to a family of Antwerp nobility: the Le Grelle family. Her maternal grandmother, Rosalie de Sweert (1901–1982), married Count Adelin Le Grelle in 1921 in Valencia, Spain. From this union two children were born, Count Richard Le Grelle (1921) and Countess Marie-Antoinette, who had four children with the Canadian ambassador Keith MacLellan.

She studied piano (first prize in piano at Conservatoire), and obtained a baccalauréat B, after studying for 13 years in a French religious institution, Sœurs de Lübeck. She enrolled at Panthéon-Assas University for law studies but abandoned them and went on to become a parliamentary assistant to René Touzet. She also was a fitting model for Schiaparelli, the French fashion house, and worked for a public-relations company.