From the peaceful French countryside to the landscapes scarred by abandoned steelworks in the Lorraine, A French Life travels through the France of yesterday and today. The intimacy of an individual journey opens on to a collective history. The narrator's buried childhood is reborn, and with it comes a procession of ghosts. The 1960s, the Algerian War, and the turning back of time, which resembles a descent into hell as it exhumes the lives of Algerian steelworkers, melting iron and factories now long gone.