Jean Meyer

Biography

Jean Meyer obtained bachelor's and master's degrees at the Sorbonne University. He has taught at Sorbonne, Perpignan, the University of Paris, the Colegio de México, the Colegio de Michoacán, and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. He has done extensive research on the Cristero War and written books on the subject for the University of Cambridge and the Universidad de Guadalajara. He also founded the Institute of Mexican Studies at the University of Perpignan in France.

His major publications deal with conservative peasants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. His work on the Cristero War is crucial for the understanding of this major uprising in Mexico following the enforcement of the anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution of Mexico. He has also published important works about Manuel Lozada, a nineteenth-century regional leader in Nayarit who fought for the rights of mestizo and indigenous peasants. Historian Eric Van Young reviewed Meyer's Esperando a Lozada, saying "the major essays are beautifully written, talky, strongly rhetorical, slightly wistful in tone, and intensely romantic and hardheaded at one and the same time, as with much of the best French annaliste history."

He is a recognized authority on the immediate post-revolutionary period in Mexico and was chosen to write the general article on Mexico in the 1920s for the Cambridge History of Latin America.

Publications