The teaching of history does not serve to train future historians, but future citizens. The historical study of the past must therefore be at the service of a political education, understood here in a broad sense, as the capacity to participate autonomously, and therefore critically, in collective life and its democratic development. From this point of view, I examine the teaching of migration issues in the French curriculum with regard to the foundational work of the historian G. Noiriel, Le creuset français, in order to relate the political stakes of a history book to those of the teaching of history, morality and civics in secondary education. Between history as a life lesson and history as a methodology, the possibility of a critical school history anchored in the idea of transforming the specific investigation of historians emerges.