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In this paper, the author analyzes the two characteristic features of teaching history in France, reliability and instability, according to the sociology of both curriculum and science. The paper considers the definition of educational content as the composition of networks bringing policies, people, and goals together. The teaching of the colonization and decolonization of Algeria since 1930 in upper-secondary schools is taken as an example for analysis of the developments in the formal history curriculum. From this example, the author treats the way in which a highly controversial issue is transformed into a teaching subject, the evolution of the curriculum, and the policy goals of such teaching in terms of socialization. After presenting characteristic features of the teaching of history in France since the 1930s, from the perspective of the effects of mass education and criticism on the formal curriculum, the author examines the contradictory consequences of the accumulation of resources used to support this and the changes in the networks contributing to its definition. In the author’s opinion, the explanation for the curriculum’s reliability and instability lies in the multiplicity of vested interests and systems of interpretation.