In 1996, the Conseil national des programmes, whose president was Luc Ferry, gave itself the goal of enacting Proposition 51 of the Nouveau contrat pour l’école (a New Deal with our schools) : to publish a textbook exemplifying the requirements of the common set of core competencies. This paper shows that this project en-countered numerous obstacles: for whom was the textbook being produced ? Who would write it ? Was it a textbook or a report ? A report would produce guidance for the writing of a textbook for a common set of core knowledge. Projects were written planning for a two volumes textbook, one for the sciences and the other for the humanities. In the end, the textbook was never produced. Nonetheless the work was not in vain since it led to the publishing of a cahier d’exigences, or notes on the requirements expected from a middle school student. This notebook is as it were the first enactment of the common set of core competencies.