Jacques Godechot

Who was Jacques Godechot?

Jacques Léon Godechot was a French historian of the French revolution, and a pioneer of Atlantic history.

As a frequent and varied contributor to the Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, he acted as "a mediator, an intermediary between readers of the journal and Anglo-Saxon and Italian historiography of the Revolution". His emphasis on the international dimension of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century revolutions was crystallized in the concepts of Atlantic history and 'occidental revolution'. In 1955 Godechot collaborated with the Yale historian Robert Roswell Palmer to present a joint paper on 'the problem of Atlantic history' at the 10th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Rome.