Professor at the Paris Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences, member of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences (1964–83), he left numerous works, in particular a major classic on "The Great Political Works from Machiavelli to Our Day" (Les grandes œuvres politiques: de Machiavel à nos jours), recently reissued with an update by Yves Guchet.
Several subsequent historians in France have acknowledged his influence; Jean-Pierre Gross writes of "A chronological and historical account, in the tradition established by Jean-Jacques Chevallier",[1] and according to the French jurist Georges Lavau: "We had a few masters who had explored certain territories, almost in solitude: André Siegfried, Raymond Aron, Jean-Jacques Chevallier, Georges Burdeau, Jean Stoetzel.
His mother was a great-granddaughter of the Ecuadorian jurist José Fernández Salvador and a granddaughter of Charles Eloi Demarquet, one of Bolivar's principal aides-de-camp.
His father was a military officer who was ordered to French Indochina the year after his son's birth and left a series of letters on Tonkin (part of what is now Vietnam) and Laos (collected and published in 1995).
On March 2, 1964, he became a member of the Institut de France in the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and in 1972 became the academy's president.