France has two modern ‘ghost towns’, access to which is restricted exclusively to members of one army corps.
The towns are called Jeoffrécourt and Beauséjour (Aisne) and both are located in the 6,000 hectare-wide military camp of Sissonne in the Hauts-de-France region of northern France.
They were built by the French military as part of the Cenzub programme, one of Europe’s largest programmes to train military forces in urban environments.
The first was a small village during the Middle-Ages – slowly requisitioned over centuries – until September 1, 1908 when it became the property of the French military and where its first training events took place in 1911.
Jeoffrécourt is not a ghost town per seGuillaume Greff
An image of an image
Jeoffrécourt was built between 2008 and 2012 and imagined as a 5,000-inhabitant town.
It is composed of a modern zone with multistoried buildings, a residential zone with pavilion-houses, an industrial and commercial area and a town centre with a place of worship – suggestive of a mosque – a mairie and narrow streets.
“Jeoffrécourt is not a ghost town, per se, because it is not and never has been a town. It was not created to be a real town. It is an image,” said Guillaume Greff, a photographer who visited Jeoffrécourt for his book Dead Cities (Kaiserin editions, 2013).
The second is, quite simply, a made-up town. Beauséjour was built in 2004 and is composed of 63 houses organised in four districts representing a slum, a town centre, an area in ruins and a defence-combat post.
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Jeoffrécourt was built between 2008 and 2012Guillaume Greff
Dead Cities was meant to question through images how different architectural styles had arranged the territory, he added.
“I have taken images of images. Jeoffrécourt has no history nor will it have any, much like the pavilion-house bonanza architectural movement of the 80s,” he said. “There are no ghosts here. There is only a soulless void,” he added, in answer to the question as to whether Jeoffrécourt could be called a ‘ghost town’.
“This suggestive scenery, with its outstanding vacuity, suppression of any style and asperity, is uncannily reminiscent of certain fragments of suburban environment,” wrote French writer and poet Jean-Christophe Bailly in The Neutralised Town and published in Dead Cities.
Intervention inland?
Between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers, a majority of whom are French army members but also British, Belgian and German soldiers, train over two-week-long programmes at the Cenzub.
The programme was conceived by the Ministry of Defence during the 90s, as war in the Balkans was raging, to prepare soldiers for full-scale operations on foreign lands.
But the environment and architecture was very much reminiscent of French landscapes, said Mr Greff, mainly because Jeoffrécourt and Beauséjour represented typical mid-sized towns.
“As if the French army was training for an intervention inland,” he said. “This disturbing observation creates a slight feeling of anxiety,” he added.
Jeoffrécourt and Beauséjour are only open to visit during the European Heritage Days.
