1918: The Faux Paris — classified defence
A dive into the luminous deception devised by Fernand Jacopozzi to fool German bombers: a fake Paris reconstructed twenty kilometres to the north-east, with its fake Gare de l'Est, its fake Champs-Élysées, and a train whose bulbs run for eighteen hundred metres.
When German bombers begin raking the Parisian sky in 1917, Clemenceau calls upon the magician of light. His mission: to become master of shadows and, in secret, the mime of Paris.
A nocturnal city, twenty kilometres to the north-east
On a bend of the Seine identical to the one that runs through the capital, between Sevran and Villepinte, Jacopozzi builds a nocturnal replica: a fake Gare de l’Est, fake factories, fake Champs-Élysées. Timber structures draped in translucent painted canvas. White, yellow, and red lamps alternately illuminating artificially produced vapours — imitating the furnaces of the real workshops.
The masterpiece: a moving train
Across eighteen hundred metres, hundreds of bulbs light one after another, running a progressive light forward with uncanny precision. Seen from above, the illusion is perfect.
The silence after the war
The device was ready after the last German raid. It was never deployed. It would later emerge that the Germans had been preparing the same strategy.
The classified defence order was lifted nearly twenty years later. The archives, long scattered, were not gathered together until the 1980s.