The middle of the 1990s saw the creation of a French-German-Swiss history textbook supported by the European Commission. Disseminated to school instructors in the Upper Rhine, it received generally positive reviews, but ended up on the dusty shelves of school libraries. This result was due to several factors, which are analysed in this article. This acknowledgement of failure leads to the argument that European cross-border cooperation is constrained by a key paradox, referred to as "low gravity", i.e. the attraction of small projects toward the local and regional levels, while major projects are pushed up to the national level. (Contains 7 notes, 2 tables, and 4 figures.)