[1] Much of his work was posthumously published in an incomplete state after he was killed in action in World War I.

[2] Born in Paris, Cochin was the son of Denys Cochin, a Parisian deputy in the National Assembly with ties to the Vatican, and the grandson of Augustin Cochin, a French politician and writer.

[3] His Catholic upbringing helped him to remain detached from the French Revolution and study it historically in a new light.

[4] Cochin studied the Revolution from a sociological perspective, cultivated from his interest in the work of Émile Durkheim,[5] and he sought to look at the revolution from a social perspective.

[6][7] François Furet believed that Cochin's work worked towards an analysis of two objectives: “a sociology of the production and role of democratic ideology, and a sociology of political manipulation and machines.”[8] Cochin was drafted into service in World War I in 1914, and he was wounded four times in service before being killed on 8 July 1916 at Maricourt, Somme.