The article deals with the political novels of Maurice Barres "Ungrounded" (1897), "A Call to a Soldier" (1900), "Their Faces" (1902). In the first novel the writer raises the problem of upbringing and education of young French people who wanted to find the meaning of life and be useful to the homeland. The other two novels are based on real events related to and exposure of the Panamanian fraud, which revealed the corruption in the Parliament of the Third Republic. Barres interprets modernity as a stage in the historical process.