Politicizing disaster: the railway accident at Pomponne, December 23, 1933

Millington, Chris ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2030-7953 (2024) Politicizing disaster: the railway accident at Pomponne, December 23, 1933. French Historical Studies, 47 (1). pp. 141-166. ISSN 0016-1071

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Abstract

The deadliest peacetime railway accident in French history occurred at 7.52pm on December 23, 1933, at Pomponne on the outskirts of Paris.  Over 200 people died as a result of the tragedy. This article explores the responses to the disaster.  These drew on long-standing fears over the power of modern technology, not to mention its potential destructiveness as witnessed over a decade previously during the Great War. Yet understandings of the accident and its causes also spoke to anxieties over the contemporary French sense of political crisis, a crisis that the crash at Pomponne helped to nurture.  The right and extreme right came to subsume the accident into its broader campaign against the Third Republic that would end in the violence of 6 February 1934.  Study of the Pomponne disaster thus sheds new light both on French anxieties about ‘modernity’ and the emergence of right-wing antiparliamentarianism in 1930s France.