5

Since the summer of 2006, high school students in their final year of study in France and Germany as well as their teachers have had at their disposal a textbook for history, jointly written by historians from both countries, which content is strictly identical while at the same time in conformity with both syllabus. What were the origins and purposes of this joint enterprise? What factors made it possible and what affected the outcome? And, finally, what is the historical, didactic and political significance of the first ever attempt? These are the questions this article seeks to answer. To do so involves reconstructing the genesis of the project (during the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Franco-German Treaty in 2003), the political and administrative work before the project could begin, the development of a frame of reference by a joint steering committee, the pre-history of the project and the institutional conditions which made it possible (e.g., earlier initiatives, multiple partnerships between French and German historians). It also involves consideration of the difficulties and challenges arising during the textbook writing, not so much from profoundly different interpretations of the past, but from very different ways of writing about and teaching history.