What stories of the past do young Canadians tell? What impact does identity have on their ideas and ways of thinking historically? What role does schooling play in transmitting a national narrative? In this paper, we address these questions in a large-scale national study of young French Canadians' understanding of the collective past. Drawing on the notion of historical consciousness, we sought to investigate two complementary features of history learning: (1) students' narratives of national history, and (2) the impact of collective identity on their historical understanding. Instead of assessing the mastery of content knowledge, our research aimed to address a more fundamental question: how do they narrate the history of their national community?