This article studies the issue of the national identity in the modern France as well
as at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries on the example of Maurice Barrès’s oeuvre. Developing the theory of organic determinism, Barrès came to the conclusion that the individual personality must belong to only one race. In order to keep the race’s purity, it is necessary to struggle against the interlopers, compromising its integrity. Barrès’s nationalist doctrine “earth and the dead” is the theoretical program, which found the forms of return to the native sources, to the regional solidarity, the call for the defense of native land.