Martin Nadaud tells the true story of an itinerant stone mason from the Creuse region, at the georgraphical heart of France, who became a builder and architect in Paris and who would eventually return to his birthplace as Prefect of the entire department. Self-taught, Nadaud was a republican who warmed to the emerging theories of socialism that would liberate so many of his class. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, he was forced to flee to a long and lonely political exile in London, returning again to Paris at the time of the Commune in 1871 to regain his public life.