His father, the doctor Godefroy Calès (1799–1868) was a deputy (Représentant du Peuple) of Haute-Garonne at the Constituent National Assembly (1848–1849) under the French Second Republic.

[3] Jean Jules Godefroy studied medicine in Paris and in Montpellier, and, after receiving his doctor's degree in 1854, he settled in his native town of Villefranche-de-Lauragais.

He thus resigned from his new position and joined the Army in November, in one of the eleven regional military camps created by Gambetta,[9] who was newly appointed Minister of the Interior and of War in the Government of National Defense.

[8] After the victory of the German troops, the signing of the Armistice of Versailles on January 28, 1871, and the suspension of the hostilities, and in accordance with the German requirements which stipulated that elections should be organized rapidly to form an Assembly aimed at ratifying peace, Calès made a second electoral attempt at the Legislative Elections of February 8, 1871: he arrived first on the list of the Republican Party led by Gambetta with 27,349 votes.

Jean Jules Godefroy Calès, however, was made Knight of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur) on July 9, 1883.

Established during the Boulanger affair, this prestigious cabinet, in which four former presidents of the Council were seating (Fallières, de Freycinet, Rouvier and Tirard), was also supported by Radical Republicans to counter the Boulangist movement.

In this last parliamentary session, Calès abstained on the re-establishment of the uni-nominal ballot (law of February 13, 1889), voted against the indefinite postponement of Constitutional revision, in favor of the Lisbon bill restrictive on the freedom of the press, and for the prosecution of three deputies who were members the far-right Ligue des Patriotes which was dissolved on April 3, 1889.

Like his father Godefroy Calès (1799–1868), Jean-Jules had a close friendship relation with the writer, philosopher, poet, historian, professor at the Collège de France and republican politician Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) and his second wife, Hermiona Asachi (1821–1900).

The son maintained a regular epistolary correspondence from 1868 to 1973 with the couple Quinet[11][12][13] during their forced exile in Switzerland (sent by Napoleon III) and after their return to France in 1870.

He had with his wife Paule Laure Blanc only one son, Godefroy Victor Albert Calès (born in Villefranche on October 31, 1856, and deceased in Sarcelles in 1940), who will succeed him later, as sub-Prefect of Florac (Lozère, 1894), then as Mayor of Villefranche-de-Lauragais (1896–1904) – where he installed public electricity for the first time in the city – and finally as General Councilor of the canton of Villefranche[5] (1898–1904 then 1907–1914[15]) in the list of the Radical-socialist party.

He was then appointed to the warehouse administration for tobacco in Bordeaux and finally tax collector in Dammartin-en-Goële in the region of Paris, where he had a rather controversial end of life.