This study is concerned with the professional condition and identity of secondary teachers in Europe. It offers an approach to the teaching profession as a socially and culturally constructed reality (a social condition) as well as a subjective experience (identity pole). In other words, it aims to explore how this social condition is appropriated by individual teachers. Although there exists a common philosophical and cultural tradition to all European countries, conceptions of teacher's role and social function are shaped by the unique history of each education system. The choice of England, Germany and France as case studies, in a study ultimately concerned with issues of teachers' identity, is not accidental in this respect. Indeed, each of them embody distinctive educational traditions in Europe (McLean, 1990). One aim of this study is to analyse whether or not these traditions are respectively affected by structural evolutions in secondary schooling. The authors will explain why the European space, home to distinctive educational and cultural traditions, can be envisaged as a pertinent and autonomous frame to examine issues of teachers' identity. Beyond national particularisms, there exists in Europe a common background to secondary teaching which has been referred to as the crisis of the secondary teaching profession. The origin of the crisis can be outlined in a few points: - the opening up of the system to new constituency of pupils who relate more or less successfully to the forms of knowledge and culture promoted by the school. - Pupils' depreciation of -or resistance to schooling as a consequence of their feeling of inadequacy to the system as well as of the shaking of the virtually guaranteed link between education and social mobility. - Teachers' loss of social status as a result of the democratisation and massification of secondary education, and resulting concerns with teacher shortage. Faced with a broadening of their original mission and with the necessity to renew their practices, how do secondary teachers handle the evolving and uncertain identity which result from the evolution of their respective working contexts? The approach selected to investigate the phenomena presented above is resolutely inductive. It draws on a literary review already well under way and an empirical study based on a number of interviews carried out with secondary teachers in the three countries. This paper will account for the various ways English, French and German practising teachers accommodate the phenomena, described earlier, which most of the European education systems experienced in the 20th century. Is this identity crisis, which many authors have referred to in their work, generalised? If so, what is distinctive about it? Does there exist, beyond cultural contexts and educational traditions -these 'founding myths'- universal patterns in the way teachers relate to their work, their role, their pupils? What institutional, personal and collegial resources can teachers draw on to face the difficulties they encounter? All of this amounts to what the authors term an identity problematic: social and professional.