He attended a state secondary school in Huy, and then the University of Liège, where he studied history.
In the mid-1930s he prospected in archives in Paris, London and The Hague, attending Charles Webster's seminar at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and François Simiand's lectures at the Collège de France.
[1] In 1938 he succeeded Herman Vander Linden lecturing on Belgian and contemporary history in Liège.
In 1946–1947 he travelled in the United States as a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, visiting the universities of Yale, Harvard, Chicago and Columbia.
[1] In his seminars at the University of Liège, he became a pioneer in the use of press reports as historical source material.