Colonel Pontcarral, a soldier on half pay who continues to admire Napoleon, withdraws to a small town life during the Bourbon Restoration. Colonel Pontcarral remains faithful to the memory of his Emperor after the Hundred Days. He returns to his Dordogne and stands up to the new regime. He marries Garlone de Ransac, a scheming woman who offers himself to him after an affair with Rosan. Shortly after their wedding, Pontcarral learns that his wife gave her old lover the ring that the colonel gave to her as a wedding present and that the emperor had given him at Austerlitz. He then kills his rival in a duel. In 1830, he regains his dignity and is tempted to start life over again with his sister-in-law, but his wife returns to him full of remorse and declaring her love forhim. Pontcarral, however, decides to leave with his regiment for a campaign in Africa from which he will never return. Bernard Zimmer, who wrote the dialogue for Delannoy’s film, must have had a fun time adding lines that were a real slap in the face to this adaptation of collaborationist Albéric Cahuet’s novel, thumbing his nose at a regime that generated increasing criticism. The film is not an outright display of the Resistance movement; it is more like an attempt to deflate a balloon with a pin. The film was released in Paris on December 11, 1942, while everyone’s attention was focused on northern Africa where the Allies had landed. At the end of the film viewers were standing and applauding vigorously as colonel Pontcarral leads his regiment toward Algeria. Today the film still maintains its nonconformist vim.