This paper looks at the Maison de l’Afrique at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, from its origins after the Second World War to the 1970s, when it became the Lucien Paye residence. It looks at the status of an autonomous house in its early days, the lives and struggles of the African students who were housed there, and the takeover of the house by the Cité administration. From the French Union to May 68, via African independence, this is the history of the African students by approaching it from the specific angle of their place of residence in Paris. The “little story” we’ll be discussing here, that of the Maison de la France d’Outre-mer (fom) at the Cité universitaire de Paris, now the Résidence Lucien Paye, can be seen as an excellent observatory of a “bigger story”. Through the history of this House the end of an Empire and the renegotiation of ties between France and its former African colonies can be seen at a micro-level, but in a very concrete way. We can also read about the ups and downs of the student movement, from its rise to prominence in the 1950s–1960s through to the heyday of 1968, leading to a number of gains followed by a return to control by the institutional powers that be. This resumption of power was both a “backlash” in the early 1970s and, in the very specific case of the fom, the liquidation of a post-colonial situation, as well as the introduction of an unequal policy of cooperation. This is also the story of “academic diplomacy”, as Guillaume Tronchet puts it, when it joins the mainstream of diplomacy The conflicts of the world were also played out at the Cité Universitaire, as these foreign students in diaspora lived and still live in a double temporality: that of France on the one hand—and in our case it was the 1968s—and that of their countries on the other. Hopes were soon followed by disillusionment.