Marseille 1936. A few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and while the Popular Front forms a government in France, a Corsican policeman is shot in the back in the middle of the Marseille street that separates the political offices of socialists and conservatives.

Local figures, the underworld, mafia, underground networks of far-right and communists, vendettas of the time and economic aristocracy, African migrants, and Italian day laborers, all get entangled in the mad choreography of violence that sets fire to Marseille and to Europe as a whole.