An unusually damaging Mw 4.9 earthquake occurred on November 11, 2019 in the south east of France within the lower Rhône river valley, an industrial region that hosts several operating nuclear power plants. The hypocentre of this event occurred at an exceptionally shallow depth of about 1 km. Here we use far-field seismological observations to demonstrate that the rupture properties are consistent with those commonly observed for large deeper earthquakes. In the absence of strong motion sensors in the fault vicinity, we perform numerical predictions of the ground acceleration on a virtual array of near-fault stations. These predictions are in agreement with independent quantitative estimations of ground acceleration from in-situ observations of displaced objects. Both numerical and in-situ analyses converge toward estimates of an exceptional level of ground acceleration in the fault vicinity, that locally exceeded gravity, and explain the unexpectedly significant damage.