Can different people from different regions tell the same narratives of the nation? How are these stories constructed? What role does schooling play in that story-telling process? In this paper, we address these questions in a large-scale study of young French Canadians' understanding of the collective past. Drawing on the notion of historical consciousness we sought to investigate the relationship between students' narratives/narrative structures and the forces that contribute to the transmission of a collective memory in a divided society. Our goal was to study the role of school history--and other 'historicizing forces'--on the shaping of people's historical consciousness.