Five highly-trained KGB agents are sent to the west to assassinate several Soviet dissidents. In order to stop the diabolical plot, an American agent must infiltrate Soviet intelligence and obtain information from a Russian computer.

Two friends, Commissioner Servolle and real estate developer Faguet, see their friendship tested by the investigation carried out following the murder of Faguet's wife.

Victor Valance, an absent father and gambler, works with shady casino operations abroad. When he returns to Paris in need of money, he plans to take advantage that Pauline, his eldest daughter now fully responsible for the whole family, has begun to work for the Ministry of Finance. Pauline thwarts his new projects but when she realizes gangsters are looking for Victor she will put her life at risk to help him and save their family.

Stephane (Victor Lanoux) is the mayor of a small village. He is also the manager of the tannery which provides the inhabitants with work. In a fit of anger, he kills his wife (Edith Scob). A judge (Jean Carmet) tries to prove his culpability, but it's not an easy task, because there is a political and social pressure.

Normandy 1850. A stagecoach drives along a road in the middle of the countryside. Inside, the passengers are all asleep except two men who are talking. Suddenly the coach stops: an axle has just broken. When one of the two men leans out of the window to see what is going on, his gaze lingers on the front a provincial abode, which seems to upset him. He soon starts remembering facts that took place forty years earlier...

Good dope is becoming rare in the North of Paris. Drugstores are being raided by junkies and gangs are nervous, fighting each others: the 'Viets', the 'Blackies', the 'Arabs', the neo-nazis 'Justiciers' and some mean gays. Vincent (Daniel Auteuil) is the good cop coming from Marseilles where he was a gangster. He's a soft method guy but also kicks assses hard and throw lethal dialog lines when needed. With the precious help of 'l'Arbalète'* (Marisa Berenson**), a tox' prostitute ex-member of Vincent's former gang, he will try to put order in that mess. There's also a violent and racist cop (Marcel Bozzuffi), Algeria veteran with hard methods, whose role could be more than to protect and to serve.

When Lise's car bumps Antoine's bike, they recognize each other from a brief fling 20 years before while at the Sorbonne. He's now a professor of Greek; she's loathe to tell him she's a police inspector. A call interrupts their first dinner date: a Deputy of the National Assembly has been murdered. She has a suspect, another Deputy, and must track him while deflecting Antoine's eye from her vocation. All roads in the inquiry lead to Christine Vallier, the dead Deputy's mistress, a beguiling 22-year-old whose mother ran the Assembly's snack bar. When more deputies die and Antoine learns Lise's identity, she must act quickly solve the crime and save her future.

1962: events in Algeria. Captain Sainbenin has just taken over the leadership of a newly created fighter commando. His relationship with the hierarchy is strained. To this war of a new type, Sainbenin intends to apply methods of a new kind. Everything is good to find the "rebels": new intelligence system, new interrogation system. When in Algiers a putsch is organized against De Gaulle by 4 of his generals, Sainbenin's men are divided: should they remain faithful to De Gaulle, or take the side of French Algeria against all odds? tragic fate of a handful of uprooted people fighting for a patriotic ideal and sacrificed in the name of this ideal.

A writer is reunited with an old childhood friend, who gives him the opportunity to devise a heist.

To his family, François Voisin is nothing more than a humdrum civil servant. In truth, for the past twenty years he has been working as a secret agent. All goes well until circumstances put his secret in danger.