Politicizing Disaster

Abstract

Abstract The deadliest peacetime railway accident in French history occurred at 7:52 p.m. on December 23, 1933, at Pomponne on the outskirts of Paris. Over two hundred 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 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 February 6, 1934. Study of the Pomponne disaster thus sheds new light both on French anxieties about “modernity” and on the emergence of right-wing antiparliamentarianism in 1930s France.