In the 1770s, Swiss farmer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi established a school for poor orphaned children in the Aargau. Up to total exhaustion he sacrificed himself for his pedagogical theories. Five years later, the project of the idealistic educator failed after bloody attacks of the French. In retrospect, the disappointed Pestalozzi experiences the last few months with "his" children.
A girl returns from a trip out of the country and is given a strip-search for drugs when she re-enters Switzerland. Lacking a place to stay, she looks up an old friend of hers and stays with him, working to pay for food for both of them. In the casual manner of such arrangements, several more people enter the scene to stay: a rich kid who has been disinherited and a girl who is an escaped convict. The working girl has been hiding some of her wages in her clothes, and the two young men steal the money, buy a car, and hare off looking for excitement.
Throughout the late 19th century and in the early part of the 20th, Russians of a wide variety of political persuasions contemplated various forms of revolution. Throughout the same period, they often had to seek asylum in other countries. This movie concerns Sergei (Roger Jendly), a revolutionary who kills a student in Russia and flees to Switzerland. Though he has the gifts and abilities to unify various revolutionary groups within Russia, once he has been forced to flee, they have no interest in him. When his presence in Switzerland threatens a trade agreement with the Tsar, he is tracked down and expelled.
