Plot synopsis: Miniseries adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's novel. Frédéric Moreau, an eighteen-year-old provincial youth, full of dreams and rather attractive, comes to Paris to study. From 1840 to the evening of the coup d'état in 1851, he learns about the world in a society in turmoil. Along the way, he encounters true love and the contingencies of pleasure, the Revolution and its false apostles, art, the power of money and stupidity, the reversibility of beliefs, brotherly friendship, and the inevitability of betrayal, without ever managing to commit himself to any cause other than that of following the loss of his illusions.