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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Sarah Teasley;
(2022)
Designing Modern Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB783740883/)
Book
Moore, Robert;
(2002)
A Time to Die: The Kursk Disaster
(/isis/citation/CBB000502567/)
Book
Krist, Gary;
(2007)
The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche
(/isis/citation/CBB370530605/)
Thesis
Joppan George;
(2019)
Airborne Colony: Culture and Politics of Aviation in India, 1910-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB791107848/)
Book
Sokolski, Henry D.;
Tertrais, Bruno;
(2013)
Nuclear Weapons Security Crises: What Does History Teach?
(/isis/citation/CBB001213746/)
Article
Giorgina Samira Paiella;
(2020)
Madness, Modernity, and Mechanization: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the Feminized Industrial Laborer, and the Rise of Automation
(/isis/citation/CBB124800215/)
Book
Karena Kalmbach;
(2021)
The Meanings of a Disaster : Chernobyl and its afterlives in Britain and France
(/isis/citation/CBB315358422/)
Article
Kim, Mi Gyung;
(2013)
Invention as a Social Drama: From an Ascending Machine to the Aerostatic Globe
(/isis/citation/CBB001320537/)
Book
Pritchard, Sara B;
(2011)
Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône
(/isis/citation/CBB001023081/)
Article
Alexander, Jennifer Karns;
(2008)
Efficiencies of Balance: Technical Efficiency, Popular Efficiency, and Arbitrary Standards in the Late Progressive Era USA
(/isis/citation/CBB000953499/)
Article
Antoniou, Yiannis;
Bogiatzis, Vassilis;
(2010)
Technology and Totalitarian Ideas in Interwar Greece
(/isis/citation/CBB001024289/)
Article
Stefan Tetzlaff;
(2023)
Contested “automobility”: Peasants, townsfolks, and infrastructures of road transport in interwar central and western India (c. 1919–39)
(/isis/citation/CBB478985604/)
Book
J. Justin Castro;
James A. Garza;
(2022)
Technocratic Visions: Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico
(/isis/citation/CBB524423162/)
Book
Fernando Esposito;
(2015)
Fascism, aviation and mythical modernity
(/isis/citation/CBB439605808/)
Article
Mark Aldrich;
(2015)
Another Wreck on the New Haven: Accidents, Risk Perception, and the Stigmatization of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, 1911–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB567062916/)
Book
William Beinart;
Saul Dubow;
(2021)
The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB985054539/)
Book
Eike-Christian Heine;
Martin Meiske;
(2022)
Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production Since the Late Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB685686375/)
Book
Kate (Kathryn L. ) Brown;
(2019)
Manual for survival : a Chernobyl guide to the future
(/isis/citation/CBB110801125/)
Article
Takuji Okamoto;
(January 2017)
Forum: Japan Before Disaster Studies Reorganization, Deregulation, and Liberalization: Postwar Development of the Japanese Electric Power Industry and Its Change after 11 March 2011
(/isis/citation/CBB657210983/)
Article
Escobar, Maria Paula;
Demeritt, David;
(2014)
Flooding and the Framing of Risk in British Broadsheets, 1985--2010
(/isis/citation/CBB001420076/)
Be the first to comment!