A railway accident at Gare Montparnasse Paris, on October 22, 1895 was caused by a brake failure. Photo / Getty Images
A railway accident at Gare Montparnasse Paris, on October 22, 1895 was caused by a brake failure. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion by Emma Donoghue
The Montparnasse derailment in 1895 saw a train crash through the station, hanging over the street.
Despite the dramatic scene, only one person, Marie Haguillard, was killed by falling masonry.
The incident inspired cultural works but led to no significant changes in railway protocols.
On the afternoon of October 22, 1895, the Company of the West’s express train from Granville to Paris was running five minutes late.
On the upper level of Montparnasse station, porters, railway charwomen, and sellers of books, sweets and Breton crepes stood waiting to meet the service. At five minutes past four, the express steamed in – still at full speed.
Instead of halting before the oak buffers, Engine 721 (a type 2-4-0 locomotive built in about 1877) smashed through them, mounted the platform and screeched 30m across the marble concourse.
It then burst out of a huge lunette window and hung diagonally over the street, nose to the ground. Its coal and water tender dangled vertically; behind them, the front baggage van wedged itself onto the balcony’s broken parapet. The parcel van, half-a-dozen carriages and rear baggage van shuddered to a halt inside the station.
The Paris Express, my latest novel, is inspired by photographs of the disaster.
Set over the eight hours the express took to make its journey from the Normandy coast to the French capital, it tells the stories of the train’s four-man crew, more than 100 passengers and the sole victim of the crash.
The derailment happened at the dawn of the electric age, yet it strikes me as a modern parable about unchecked growth – what happens when we make a cult of high-tech, forgetting to check whether the brakes work and not caring who or what gets destroyed. AI, anyone?
A dramatic snapshot photograph of a derailed steam locomotive at Montparnasse Station, Paris, taken by an unknown photographer. Photo / Getty Images
Emergency services rushed to the scene at Montparnasse, but no one on the train nor inside the station was killed or seriously injured.
Guillaume Pellerin, the driver, and Victor Garnier, the stoker, had flung themselves out just before the crash. Albert Mariette, the senior guard, hurt his leg. A few passengers received bumps and bruises; many in the rear carriages barely felt a jolt.
In the Place de Rennes below (now Boulevard de Vaugirard), the sharp hearing and quick reactions of two horses that had bolted away with their double-decker tram saved their passengers. But Marie Haguillard, a 37-year-old street newspaper vendor, was so crushed by falling masonry that her remains had to be carried away in a bucket.
Parisians rushed to the shattered station the moment they heard the boom, many buying train tickets to squeeze in for a closer look. The crowd was estimated at 100,000, and in the excitement, a man with the name Auge dropped dead of a heart attack.
Photographers, both professional and amateur, captured the bizarre spectacle of the train dangling from the window.
First on the scene was one from the studio of Levy Fils et Cie. If you squint at his photograph, through the steam, smoke and dust, you can make out two men standing on the station roof surveying the devastation.
Other shots were taken from various angles in the days after the crash, with the station clock showing 9.45am, 10.45am and 11.30am as the scene was cleared. No one seems to have thought to photograph the body of the train parked upstairs on the concourse.
French publications illustrated reports with engravings based on real photographs, some made more lurid with drawings of fleeing passers-by.
Many of the 40 articles from 26 publications I studied in the Bibliotheque de Gallica, France’s online library, are casual with facts. Names are recorded phonetically (the dead newspaper seller’s name is given as Aguilard, Aguillard, Aiguillard, Aquilard, Aguélard, or Gillart), or simply invented.
The one passenger to give a detailed interview was Jules-Felix Gevelot, an ammunition tycoon, who had realised the train was about to crash and calmly told his wife and her friend to jump onto the seats in case the carriages telescoped and severed their legs.
Monsieur Dois, another passenger, said he had kicked his carriage door open so that he and his fellow passengers could escape. When they saw the front of the train had shot right out of the window, they burst out laughing. One couple rushed off in different directions, refusing to give their names.
Pellerin, the driver, was so upset, he had palpitations and claimed the train’s Westinghouse air brake had malfunctioned without warning. But it is highly implausible that the American-made failsafe brake could have been the primary cause. What distinguished October 22 from the express’ other runs was a delay caused by a VIP passenger.
There happened to be three deputies of the French National Assembly on board that day, returning to Paris for the parliamentary session.
One, Albert Christophle (governor of the Credit Foncier bank and a former Minister of Public Works), not only requested an unscheduled stop at isolated Briouze, but also insisted that his private train carriage be hitched on, which cost the express a 10-minute delay.
Pellerin, trying to make up the time, drove into Paris too fast; drivers and stokers could earn a bonus (up to 40% of their salary) if they stayed on schedule.
Mariette, the guard, may have been napping over his paperwork, which suggests overwork was a contributing factor.
The whim of a rich and powerful passenger met unrelenting pressure from railway bosses, with fatal results. There was no leeway in an economy of unfettered capitalism running on “railway time” – the standardised time zones introduced in the 19th century to prevent trains colliding, which is ironic.
Asked their first thoughts on hearing the noise of the crash, several locals said, in their blase, cosmopolitan way, that they had assumed it was another terrorist attack. (The year before, Sante Geronimo Caserio, an Italian anarchist, had assassinated Sadi Carnot, the French President, by stabbing him outside the Palais du Commerce in Lyon.)
They were wrong, of course. But having had a few close shaves myself, – missing the Nice Bastille Day massacre by a week, the London Bridge attack by a day – I decided to ratchet up the tension in my novel by asking what if, as a complicating factor, there had been a bomber on the Paris Express?
Engine 721 was hauled away by horses and needed only minor repairs; it would remain in service until 1929. The upper concourse, facade and balcony were repaired and stood until the station was demolished and replaced in 1966.
As railway accidents went, the Montparnasse derailment was nothing remarkable. Oddly enough, it did not even rate a mention in that year’s Revue Generale des Chemins de Fer (General Railways Review). Trains frequently derailed or crashed into one another, passers-by, passengers, or (more often) workers on the line. Accidents were tacitly accepted as the price of speed and convenience.
The Company of the West held an inquiry in 1896, but its conclusions were tentative. The sentences handed down were mild – prison and a fine for Pellerin, a fine for Mariette – and seem to have been suspended. No protocols were changed; air brakes were still trusted, and drivers continued to be implicitly encouraged to speed.
Life went on, but not for the napping guard Mariette, who died three weeks after the verdict at the age of 42 – a lingering effect of his leg injury, maybe, or could he have felt guilty enough to take his own life?
Marie Haguillard’s two little boys were abandoned by both the company and their mother’s common-law husband, and packed off to a Normandy orphanage. The younger would die within a year, but the elder would survive to give his life for France on the Marne in 1914.
Despite having no impact on the railway industry, the Montparnasse derailment lodged in our cultural memory as a bizarre, iconic spectacle.
By the 1990s, it was showing up on posters, album covers, graphic novels and even in an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine. A facade at the Mundo a Vapor theme park in Brazil recreates the scene.
In 2011, Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo – itself adapted from a 2007 book by Brian Selznick – conjures the disaster in a thrilling dream sequence.
A century and a quarter after the crash, the mad image of the vertical train still captures how it feels when your busy day suddenly takes a turn.
