This paper offers three different views of the work of Francoise T?tard, who died in 2010. As a historian of the young, both the troubled and those doing well, she opened up many fields of work and invented mountains of archives. She was interested in justice for minors and also popular education, in which she played an active part. Confronted with such a complex work and life, it was difficult to give anything other than a partial and fragmented view of the person. However at least one link unites the three aspects of her work mentioned here: the necessity of history both as a science and as a practice.