For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

A gambler has the same name as a billionaire. Suddenly he gets lucky, finds love and wins 24 million.

On the occasion of an auction organized for a charity party, a penniless man buys a kiss for a hundred thousand francs.

A street singer becomes the star of the circus but his pal Armand shows him who his real friends are.

For sentimental reasons, Monsieur Imberger, a fifty-year-old, disappears. Everyone thinks he was murdered but repeatedly he reappears. Inspector Barfin takes care of this mystery...

At the borders of the Saharan desert, the dramatic situation of a battalion of light infantry attacked by the enemy.

Claude, who temporarily replaces his father at the head of a department store, falls in love at first sight with a pretty female customer. He finds out that she is named Solange and that she is the goddaughter of Professor Hauteclerc, who runs a private psychiatric hospital. To come closer to the girl of his dreams, Claude has a crazy idea: he pretends to be mad so as to be placed in Hauteclerc's institution.

Director of a music hall, the dubious Ribero, to save himself from bankruptcy, only hopes for the victory of his horse. An English lord enlists his crack Master Love in the race. Ribero will try to prevent its departure. He is thwarted in his dark projects by the lord's daughter, captain of a troop of girls, and by a wise and determined sportsman who does not hesitate, for the occasion, to become a jockey. Master Love wins the race, Ribero is confused, a few weddings are celebrated.

Marie Leroux, who is married to Charles, an honest, understanding country doctor, lives an uneventful, rather monotonous life.Her husband is a kind man but he does not give her any thrill or excitement. One day, Marie meets Olivier Dumas-Beaulieu, a handsome industrialist, who is in the process of leaving his fiancée Corinne, despite her being pregnant by him. It is easy for the confirmed womanizer he is, to seduce Marie, who very foolishly thinks she has found true love. Shortly afterward Charles is shot dead by Olivier while the two men were having a quarrel about Marie. The latter, who finds the corpse, believes her husband has committed suicide. Which is not the police's opinion and Marie is arrested and condemned to ten years in prison. Annihilated by such unfair treatment and, worse, by the separation from her beloved eight-year-old daughter, she still manages to survive and to serve her sentence.

Sylvain, sentenced to death, assures the visiting priest that his life could have been completely different, and invents different situations.