During a televised debate on the Algerian war in the early 1980s, Professor Paulet denounced the methods of Captain Caron, killed in action in 1957. The widow of the captain, Patricia, decided to file a defamation suit.

In May 1978, the mining town of Kolwezi in Katanga, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Belgian Congo) is under attack from a group of communist guerillas coming from nearby Angola. The Europeans who work for the Belgian mining company and the Blacks who live in the town are taken as hostages by the invaders, who start a blood bath, shooting Europeans as well as Africans. Many of the Europeans being French, the French decide to organize a counter-attack, and to send a Regiment of Paratroopers from the Foreign Legion. The movie follows the stories of Delbart, a former non-commissioned officer, who was about to go back to France with his African wife and his child, Damrémont, who was Delbart's replacement, Bia, a Zairian doctor, and Annie, an American married to a Belgian engineer as well as Non com Legion officer Federico and the French Ambassador and the Military Attaché.

Reading old letters, a young girl from Châteauroux, Carole, discovers that her father was an American soldier whose regiment was based in town in the 1950s. She will try by all means to find people who remember this period.

Widowed at the age of twenty, Madame Boissière is a real mother hen, excessively brooding over her two sons Robert and Claude. She spoiled the marriage of one and kept the other away from any female presence. The latter runs off and marries a girl from the mountains. When his brother dies, the couple agree to return to live with Madame Boissière, who tries to separate them.

Athanase Pernath is a gem cutter in the Prague ghetto. In spite of himself, he becomes embroiled in the lives of his neighbors. Family feuds, swindles, jealousies and revenge lead Pernath to prison, while the threat of the Golem, a monster created by a rabbi and awakening every thirty-three years, hangs over the city.

Enrique Chacon kills Oscar Romero, a Catholic archbishop in San Salvador. The CIA calls a special agent, Malko Linge, a ruined prince who lives with an expensive woman - Countess Alexandra - to get rid of this nuisance of a man. He does, with many encounters with sweet girls, and macho villains.