His major publications deal with conservative peasants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. His work on the Cristero War is crucial for the understanding of this major uprising in Mexico following the enforcement of the anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution of Mexico. He has also published important works about Manuel Lozada, a nineteenth-century regional leader in Nayarit who fought for the rights of mestizo and indigenous peasants.[3][4][5] Historian Eric Van Young reviewed Meyer's Esperando a Lozada, saying "the major essays are beautifully written, talky, strongly rhetorical, slightly wistful in tone, and intensely romantic and hardheaded at one and the same time, as with much of the best French annaliste history."[6] He has also written on Soviet and Russian history.[2]
He is a recognized authority on the immediate post-revolutionary period in Mexico and was chosen to write the general article on Mexico in the 1920s for the Cambridge History of Latin America.[7]
Meyer, Jean (2009). El celibato sacerdotal. Su historia en la Iglesia católica. Mexico: Tusquets. ISBN9786074210668.
Meyer, Jean (2008). La cruzada por México. Los católicos de Estados Unidos y la cuestión religiosa en México. Mexico: Tusquets. ISBN9789706991898.
Meyer, Jean (2006). La Gran Controversia entre las Iglesias Católica y Ortodoxa. Mexico/Madrid: Tusquets.
Meyer, Jean (2003). El Sinarquismo, el Cardenismo y la Iglesia: 1937–1947. Mexico: Tusquets. ISBN9789706990693.
Meyer, Jean (2002). Anacleto González Flores, el hombre que quiso ser el Gandhi mexicano. Madrid, Mexico: Fundación Emmanuel Mounier. ISBN9789686839555.
Meyer, Jean (2002). Yo, el Francés. Biografía colectiva de los oficiales de la intervención francesa. Mexico: Tusquets. ISBN9786074210163.
^Jean Meyer, Esperando a Lozada. Guadalajara: El Colegio de Michoacan 1984.
^Jean Meyer, La tierra de Manuel Lozada. Mexico City:CEMCA 1990.
^"Manuel Lozada" in Encyclopedia of Mexico, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997, 763-64.
^Eric Van Young, "To See Someone Not Seeing: Historical Studies of Peasants and Politics in Mexico." Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 6, no. 1 (1990): 147.
^republished as "Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s" in Mexico Since Independence, Leslie Bethell, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press 11991, pp. 201-240.