American Historians Remember Jacques Godechot

Abstract

In 1953 I went to Toulouse as a graduate student from Johns Hopkins University. I had the privilege of meeting Georges Lefebvre in Paris that September, and he told me to see Godechot when I arrived in the Midi. I remember well those brick buildings on the Avenue Lautmann, a block from the Cathedral of Saint Sernin. Jacques Godechot came to class wearing a homburg hat and overcoat and carrying his briefcase. I recall the first meeting in his office where I muddled through my bad French, trying to explain my project on the local nobility. Godechot packed me off to the archives on the Place Salin, and like Lefebvre, advised me to begin with one noble family. He was not at all convinced that the nobles of Toulouse were very entrepreneurial (as Fred Lane, my mentor at Hopkins, suggested), but, said Godechot, Allez-y. C'est possible, apres tout. I was a rather impetuous and self-absorbed student then, and I would even stop Godechot in the street to ask him some technical research question. Once I asked him without warning if he thought the vingtizeme tax-roles of 1750 gave an approximate evaluation of noble incomes. He always took time to give me a precise answer. On this occasion he suggested I rework the tax declarations using a higher yield of grain for the region where the nobles had their estates. It turned out that this suggestion was of crucial importance to my thesis. As Godechot put it, the nobles cheated in a more or less uniform manner, making it possible to rework the whole series by a single formula. I remember the first regional history conference I attended in