The plastic behaviour of FCC materials is studied under cyclic tensile–compression loading at room temperature. The material is an oxygen-free high conductivity copper. The purpose of the work is to model the onset of plasticity, then the cycle by cycle evolution of the localized strain, at grain scale and at mesoscopic scale. A polycrystalline aggregate taking into account the material microstructure is developped to perform finite element simulations corresponding to the experiments. Finite element calculations are carried out on this mesh, using a constitutive law which takes into account the crystallographic orientation of each grain. An analysis of the localisation scheme is performed at different steps of the cyclic loading.