This article, co-written by a French researcher in performance arts, a secondary school teacher, and a French-Canadian stage director from a puppet theater company (Le Sous-marin jaune), questions the possibility of using live performance as a tool to teach the interrelation between the use of images and teaching history. By placing ourselves in a historical and didactical perspective, we begin by the analysis of the stage version of a puppet adaptation of Tolstoï’s War and Peace. Then, according to a secondary class students’ reception of the performance, we observe their positioning towards « theatrical images », as critics inhabited by history. Thus, we can measure the legitimacy of such an approach in the fields of cultural humanism, the education of images, and history teaching.