Philippe Berre
Confidence trickster (1954-2021)
Philippe Berre (born 6 June 1954 in Paris, France) is a French impostor and confidence trickster whose story inspired a 2009 movie In the Beginning by Xavier Giannoli, where Berre was interpreted by French actor François Cluzet.
Impersonations
Construction engineer
For a month in 1997, Philippe Berre impersonated a civil engineer responsible for the construction of a segment of the A28 autoroute. He recruited personnel, rented material and mounted a construction site near Saint-Marceau, Sarthe; his team then started construction but he was eventually arrested after suspicions raised by one of the material suppliers.
Ministry of Agriculture official
In 2010, he impersonated an official of the French Ministry of Agriculture sent to Charron, Charente-Maritime in order to assist with relief efforts after the Xynthia windstorm. For four days, he signed contracts with various companies in the name of the ministry while keeping the fees for himself, he also rented material and had the mayor pay for it.
“Philippe Berre” enters the record as confidence trickster (1954-2021). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Philippe, Berre and Confidence can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3379340. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 2009, 1997 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philippe Berre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.