The publications of the French periodicals during the World War II present interesting material for the analysis of the propaganda methods and the intellectual climate in France in 1939–1945. The coverage of the events of the Great Patriotic War in the French press remains virtually unexplored, despite the high degree of relevance of this topic both for the study of sociocultural processes in French society and for imagology research, in particular that of the transformations of the USSR images during the development of relations between the USSR and the West. The article aims to analyze the peculiarities of the formation of the image of the city of Petrozavodsk by different types of French periodicals, as well as the dynamics of the number and intensity of such publications during the Second World War. News about the events related to the capital of Karelia was published exclusively by French collaborationist print media, and such significant phenomena as the renaming of the city and the establishment of concentration camps in it and its surroundings were not covered at all. At the same time, the features of the general sequence of publications related to Petrozavodsk corresponded to the typically used logic of publications about the regions new to the French readers. The article is the first study of this topic in historiography, which determines its research novelty