School handbooks from yesterday to today: Thefrench example

The school handbook has been for a long time devaluated for bibliographers, archivists and even for the historian community, but durign the last decades and increasing interest hast emerged among educational and textbook historians. First of all, the author the reasons of a textbook as an important source for the historian and the motives of such an unexpected interest for this subject, and afterwards make a brief historical review of the French school edition, specially focoused to the evolution of the handbook as a pedagogical tool. He tries to enlighten the different parameters that could have been successively implicated in the concept and use of handbooks in France, joining it closely current questions (increasingly complex handbooks, incidence of advanced technologies, teacher's training).