The collapse of France in 1940 and the founding of an authoritarian State induced an unprecedented exodus of French intellectuals. The Jews, the antifascists and the recently naturalized citizens all suddenly became “ undesirables ” and were quickly relieved of their teaching posts by legislation passed by the Vichy government. The Rockefeller Foundation widened its aid program -which had been set up in 1933 to rescue threatened German scholars- to include French scholars who were discriminated against by offering them a scholarship for two years.What was the strategy that governs the selection process? How did the Rockefeller Foundation, other aid associations and the American scholars in the USA, soon to enter the war, receive the arrival of these newcomers? Moreover, was this an opportunity, deliberately seized upon by the Americans, to reverse the intellectual deficit between the old and the new worlds?