In Paris, under the Restoration, Julie de Chaverny, a young woman admired and envied by all, has been suffering for six years from an unhappy marriage to her husband, M. de Chaverny. She finally gives in to the advances of a young man she's known since childhood, deciding at last to live her own life. She wants to run away with him, but discovers it's only a passing fancy. Feeling disgraced and laughed at, she sets off for Nice to join her mother.

Jean-Louis Matouzec works for French National Library as an expert looking after the restoration of old manuscripts.He falsifies marriage certificates as his wife refuses divorce.

Pétepan learns that his money has been lost by Robinhoude brothers.He asks his assistants to withdraw his amount from the bank.

All sorts of spies are buzzing around Michel, whose cow, Dorothée, produces 200 liters of milk a day thanks to a treatment of his own invention. Dorothée is kidnapped and found. But now everyone disowns her. No matter! Dorothée's productivity will enrich Michel and his wife Nicole, who have opened a rotisserie; milk cocktails are in fashion.

Bandits see the fruits of their theft fall into the hands of black jackets.

Two police inspectors pursue a dangerous counterfeiter on the run.

Ordered to seduce French captain and steal from him classified papers, Mata Hari, an exotic dancer and a spy, instead falls in love with him and blows the cover.

Bad financial conditions compel an aristocratic family to do strange work.

The story of five girls that lose their virginity.

Paris, France, during the First World War. While thousands of soldiers die every day on the battlefields, Henri Landru, a seemingly respectable furniture dealer, married and father of four children, relentlessly feeds his own sinister factory of death.

Usually cast as secret agent/private eye Lemmy Caution, Eddie Constantine plays "Eddie" in The Empire of Night. This time, Constantine is a cabaret singer at odds with a criminal gang. When the villains try to take over every nightclub in town for their own nefarious purposes, Eddie sings a new tune with his fists. The story takes several unexpected turns, but Constantine remains in charge throughout.

The director of a dairy cooperative in La Manche dies in a vat of milk. In line to succeed him are his four deputy managers, all with very different temperaments: the aristocratic Dufaux, the seductive Courtin, the pious Lainé and the wait-and-see Tousseur. Each of them pulls out all the stops to win a major order from Morloch. Once this is achieved, election to the post of director by the cooperators is all but assured.

Seven directors each dramatize one of the seven deadly sins in a short film. In "Anger," a domestic argument over a fly in the Sunday soup escalates into nuclear war. In "Sloth," a movie star would rather pay someone to tie his shoe than bend over to do it himself, and he can't be bothered to accept a starlet's sexual favors. In "Gluttony," a peasant family on its way to the funeral of a relative who died from indigestion stops regularly to eat and drink en route, arriving in time to eat some more. In "Greed," a high-class prostitute refunds the price of a cadet's lottery ticket. In "Pride," an unfaithful wife finds reason to reform. And so on through lust and envy.

Anger seizes a man who finds a fly in his Sunday soup. It spreads through his neighborhood, his city, his country and soon the whole world. (Segment of "Les sept péchés capitaux")

A young man who lives on women meets his match in the young wife of a rich industrialist. Their affair is doomed by her taste for luxury and his dislike of her coolness.

Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.

A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.

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.

Two men spend a night in Paris trying to pick up women.

An aimless young man is committed to a psychiatric hospital by his father in an attempt to cure him of his delinquent tendencies.

A shallow, provincial wife finds her relationship with her preoccupied husband strained by romantic notions of love, leading her further towards Paris and the country wilderness.

An American sculptor, passioned by literature, comes to Paris to perfect his art, but ends up with barely no money, and to survive has to sell The New York Herald Tribune, at night, to his compatriots. A look at the bohemian Parisian life of the fifties.