The French were building a “sham Paris” north of the capital near the end of World War I to fool German bombers.

Even if it didn’t make much sense.

Germany wasn’t bombing France and reconstructing a credible City of Light even in pre-radar days was a massive undertaking.

“I don’t think they got very far. It started pretty late in the war,” bookseller John Ptak told the Star. “It really wasn’t that good an idea.”

Ptak stumbled on plans and drawings published in a 1920 Illustrated London News and posted it to his Ptak Science Books blog, triggering new interest in the little-known attempt at subterfuge.

While the German Gotha bombers were bypassing France en route to England, aerial attacks on Paris “were coming,” said Ptak.

“Bombing in World War I wasn’t a very successful operation. They were basically throwing the bombs over the side.”

Ptak’s discovery spurred French newspaper Le Figaro to dig into archives to explain “this incredible project.”

The newspaper discovered a French magazine, L’Illustration, had detailed the scheme about two weeks before the British magazine picked up the story.

At the start of 1918, L’Illustration reported, the Secretary of State for Aeronautics expanded the plan from using acetylene lights to mimic Paris to building an entire sham Parisnorth of the city near Saint-Denis.

Fernand Jacopozzi, the engineer who would go on to illuminate the Eiffel Tower, was signed up to create a dummy city out of patterns of light to imitate the real City of Lights, L’Illustration said.

Factories in the northern suburbs of Paris were thrown into the Potemkin city planning. Engineers tried to figure out how to simulate the curve of the Seine river, the inner railway ring and the sweep of the Champs Elysees.

First, a Gare de l'Est train station went up with “buildings, roads starting platforms and trains moving trains, tracks and signals primers, and factory buildings and furnaces in operation,” L'Illustration said. Wooden buildings were covered with translucent paint “to imitate the dirty glass roofs of the factories.”

Different coloured lamps tried to simulate different lighting in a city “to draw the attention of enemy airmen but not to arouse their suspicions.”

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The ultimate fakery, L’Illustration said, was to use lights as a “cloaking device” along a two-kilometre route to simulate a moving train.

Would it have worked? Le Figaro pointed out the Germans were planning a similar dummy city and speculated that if pilots started wondering what was real and what was fake, the doubt itself made the sham a success.

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