La Fondation Rockefeller au Québec : boursiers et officiers au coeur des circulations savantes (1941-1954)

Abstract

Universities are privileged channels for many philanthropic foundations, which have sought to advance their causes and ideals through them. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Rockefeller Foundation deployed human and financial resources to integrate French-speaking Quebec into North American networks and promote the emergence of French-Canadian elites capable of forging ties with English-speaking North America. Still little studied to date, Rockefeller’s activities in this province and in academic circles have been analyzed mainly in quantitative terms, particularly through funding and institutional transformations. In this article, we focus instead on the experiences of individuals associated with the Foundation, including Rockefeller officer John Marshall, who made several trips to Quebec, and a number of French-Canadian fellows. Through the creation of formal and informal networks, the promise of funding, and the recruitment of fellows and informants, Marshall demonstrated what could be called firm discretion coupled with suggestive authority. Faced with this authority, scholarship recipients, far from being passive pawns in the great game of transnational circulation, despite the sometimes complicated conditions of their stay in the United States, were able to make the most of the situation, maximizing the symbolic capital of their study abroad experience and, in the cases we have selected, becoming significant cultural mediators.