The story is set during a workers' strike in Nantes in 1955. Steel worker François Guilbaud is one of the strikers, and he rents a room from Margot Langlois, a widow who sympathizes with the strikers although she is herself upper-class. He has a pregnant girlfriend named Violette Pelletier, to whom he becomes less and less attracted, and abandons. When he tries to defend his be...