Abstract
This article aims to show that the French scientific missions in Brazil had a fundamental role in rooting the French human sciences in the decades before the foundation of universities in the 1930s. In the context of the disputes between France and the United States for cultural and scientific domination in Latin America, the strategie of French teachers was to establish social relations and practices of cultural and scientific diffusion in socially and intellectually dominant milieus. These initiatives were successful thanks to the homology of position between French teachers and educators in the intellectual circle of São Paulo - which contributed to the relative distance between educators and the ruling elites. I conclude that the circulation of the French social sciences encountered barriers within the educational field itself, dictated by the growing anti-Durkheimian spirit.
Keywords:
Georges Dumas; French scientific missions; reformist eductors, human sciences