A Paris schoolmaster, tells the story of the famed Paris boulevard, the Champs-Elysées, from its beginnings in 1617, as a road cut by Marie de Médicis through marshes and woods, through its garish bourgeois splendor under Napoleon III, to the present.

In this urban walkabout, Sacha Guitry turns to one of the most beautiful avenues in the world to draw an amusing, graceful portrait of the French capital through the decades. Using outdoor location photography and frequent Godard-style jump cuts, the film is a one-man history of a whole country.