The history of Les Hautes-Alpes that formerly belonged to the Dauhiné and/or the Provence is used to shape the identity of this territory. But this “shared identity” seems to be a rhetoric that is built and used in very different ways by the local actors. When either component of identity (of the Provence or of the Dauphiné) is privileged to define the territory of Les Hautes-Alpes it appears as a border space between two entities, an elastic space whose various definitions are derived from scholarly classifications (by historians, geographs, ethnologists, linguists).