Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars

2. The City of the Future

Just before the end of the First World War, military strategists in France undertook the construction of an entire city, a city of lights. They decided to call it “Paris.” Responding to the threat of aerial attack, the army developed an elaborate plan to build this second Paris, a trompe l’oeil that could pass for the city from above, just northwest of the real Paris, near the suburb of Maisons-Lafitte (figure 2.1). Situated at a place on the Seine where the river bends in much the same way as it curves through the capital, Faux Paris was part of a larger scheme that included two other false target locations. One at l’Orme de Morlu, northeast of Saint-Denis, replicated the train stations and tracks of the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est. The other, located directly east of the city, simulated an industrial park. Together, the three decoys held the potential to mislead enemy pilots, diverting possible strikes away from the capital. An expert electrician named Fernand Jacopozzi had proposed the idea to the French Ministry of War early in 1918. Given that aerial attacks on Paris were most likely to occur after dark, Jacopozzi’s plans included illuminating structural mock-ups of the city’s key landmarks and monuments. Observers hailed the designs as remarkably convincing visual deceptions that simulated very well the nighttime appearance of the capital and its environs. In 1920, one author noted that Jacopozzi’s “Gare de l’Est, with its lighting effects of trains running, [would] remain a chef-d’oeuvre of the genre.”1 The stakes involved in developing this counterfeit of the nation’s principal urban center included the safety of millions of citizens and the protection of C H A P T E R 2 The City of the Future 44 F u t u r e t e n s e the seat of the French government. During the First World War, the introduction of new military weapons and means of attack had rendered civilians as well as soldiers vulnerable in unprecedented ways. Having explored the morale, mobilization, and militarization of those on the “home front,” historians have recently begun to focus their attention on how the violence and destruction of the war itself more directly affected the lives and landscapes of civilians.2 Indeed, capital cities such as Paris were “special cases.”3 Furthermore, closest to the front lines, the French capital was a target unlike London or Berlin.4 Germany had attacked the city from the skies most intensely in the first and final years of the conflict. A total of twenty-four air raids and three zeppelin attacks against the city from 1914 to 1918 resulted in the death of more than 250 Parisians and several hundred more wounded. The German military had also employed long-range guns stationed on the ground to bombard the city. By the end of the conflict, the combined attacks on Paris resulted in almost 600 deaths and between 1,200 and 1,500 wounded.5 2.1. “Faux Paris.” Lt. Col. Arsène Vauthier, Le Danger aérien et l’avenir du pays, 1930. t h e C i t y o F t h e F u t u r e 45 The military halted construction of false target sites like Faux Paris with the armistice in November 1918. Yet the generation of phantasmatic versions of the capital did not end, just as it had not begun, with the war. Historically, Paris had been as much a set of ideas as a physical terrain inhabited by people, buildings, and vehicles. By the interwar years, the urban landscape was already the focus of a range of investments in both the past and future of the French nation. If Faux Paris had emerged as a response to the realities of wartime, the “real” Paris that the project imitated was also, in its own ways, a space of imagination, memory, and anticipation in the wake of the conflict. The first chapter of this book showed how the body functioned as a crucial site for the negotiation of both experience and expectation in the interwar years. In this chapter, I explore a series of representations of Paris as a “city of the future” that expressed the complex relationship between memory and anticipation after 1918. Rich in its historic significance, the city was also a place...