Apparently intended for a narrow audience, the books “for use at the École royale militaire” play a key role in the school-books’economy of the second half of the XVIIIth century. On the one hand, the military and aristocratic purposes of the institution lead to the selection of a specific educational material, and even to the elaboration of ad-hoc instruments. On the other hand, these school-books can be considered at a wider scale, since the institution is held as a model by the Encyclopédistes and the 1776 institutional reform, which leads to the creation of twelve provincial military colleges, favours a country-wide demand for such textbooks. The tension between the adaptation to the educational requirements of the institution and the desire to offer new school-books’models is examined in this article.