A textbook is a complex object at crossroad of different approaches, institutional, scientific, didactical, editorial, which all take part in its conception. In fact, the texbook is genuine bedrock for social representations that can be scrutinized using quantitative and qualitative methods. This paper analyses the representations of the Cold war in French history and geography textbooks for secondary education, published from 1959 to 2006. We show that textbooks are more and more illustrated through years. The pictures, as well as the texts of the lesson, provide a narrative based on the central notion of "the division of the World" embodies in characters, events and historical concepts as well. These pictures act as a network, exactly as they do in the daily press, and therefore they convey a collective memory rather than a historical knowledge.
textbooks; mass media; representations; pictures; Cold War
