A little town in the north of France, 1941. Blanche has three children. She worries about her husband Victor, who often goes out at night. Actually, Victor belongs to the Resistance. Soon, Blanche will be a resistant too. In the network, there is also Germinal, the hairdresser. His daughter Marie knows everything and asks to be part of it... Chronicle of the occupation and of the resistance through the eyes of the women.

On August 5, 1944, in Brittany, civilians fell into the hands of the German army. Among them, Jean Palu, a man like the others, who looks back on his life. Between failure and illness, he paints a bitter picture of his life.

In August 1792, on the eve of the attack on the Tuileries, Catherine Hubscher, a laundress in Paris, met a sergeant and an artillery lieutenant who would become respectively Marshal Lefèvre and Emperor Napoleon I. 1810. Napoleon was about to marry Marie-Louise. Fearing the inconstancies and moral lessons of Marshal Lefebvre, the emperor asked her husband to keep her away from the wedding ceremonies. He is unaware that the hotheaded young woman has received a personal invitation from the Austrian embassy.

The neglected daughter of an industrialist who made his fortune in explosives supplies during the war and of a mother who was mostly concerned with herself, Monique Lerbier is a pretty blonde with generous but strong ideas and a hard character. She has chosen to be an atheist since her adolescence and does not tolerate injustice and social hypocrisy. She was to be married to an engineer, Lucien Vigneret. It was an arranged marriage, the dowry having to allow Vigneret to enter the capital of his father's company, which needed it to finance its business. But two weeks before the wedding, Monique surprises the fiancé with a mistress.

May 1944, a group of French servicewomen and resistance fighters are enlisted into the British Special Operations Executive commando group under the command of Louise Desfontaines and her brother Pierre. Their mission, to rescue a British army geologist caught reconnoitering the beaches at Normandy.

Gaspard is a brilliant pupil who makes a clean sweep of all the prizes every year. He despises his family, and do not want to remain a crude peasant like them. Two businessmen, Mister Fereor and Mister Frolichein, want him to work in their factories. The former wins the contest. Gaspard is a young Turk who wants to make his way of life at any cost. He steals ideas from other young men and becomes an occasional informer. He wins his boss over and, as this tycoon has no son, he is adopted by him even though his biological parents are still alive. But unfair competition threatens Fereor's business and Gaspard is forced to marry Frolichein's daughter, Mina.

Romain, a handsome young man in his thirties, only thinks about his work and never reveals his emotions. He can't manage to "flirt" with girls. His older brother Luc, who has become a screenwriter, is homosexual and never stops putting his brother down. However, the two brothers get along better than they seem to. Their father has a neurodegenerative disease and must be placed in a specialized institution. This ordeal will allow Romain to better understand himself as a man.