A textbook is a very complex object, a crossroad of different approaches (institutional, scientific, didactical, editorial) witch take part of his elaboration. In fact, it is a very interesting bedrock for social representations, that we are studying through a combined quantitative and qualitative method. This paper analyses the representations of the Cold war in the French textbooks from 1959 to 2006. We see that textbooks are more and more illustrated. The pictures, with the text of the lesson, provide a narrative based on the central notion of "the division of the world". These picture act as a network, exactly as they do in the daily press, and therefore they convey more a collective memory than historical knowledge.