The Paris Express
52 pages • 1-hour read
Emma DonoghueThe Paris Express
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, pregnancy loss, and racism.
The Human Cost of Technological Progress
The Paris Express presents technological progress as a system that converts vulnerable human beings into expendable fuel. The railway promises speed, efficiency, national connection, and economic growth, yet the novel repeatedly exposes how those promises depend upon invisible bodily sacrifice. Furthermore, the dangers of progress are distributed unevenly along lines of class and labor, with the greatest risks borne by those considered least valuable. From the arrangement of the carriages to the wage structures governing the crew, and finally to the way disaster is remembered, the novel demonstrates how modern progress operates through a hierarchy of disposability.
Donoghue establishes this critique through the train’s physical structure. As Blonska notes, “Third Class is always placed at the front of the train so as to catch the brunt of the coal dust and of course so that in the event of a head-on collision, those in the cheap seats will do their duty by getting crushed before their betters” (17). Even before the crash occurs, the train’s design reveals an implicit social logic: wealth purchases distance from danger. The poor are positioned closest to impact, dirt, and risk so that the comfort of wealthier passengers can be preserved behind them. Technological progress is therefore inseparable from class stratification. The railway embodies modernity, but it does so while reinforcing deeply entrenched social hierarchy.
The Barthélemy epigraph that opens the book—“Every great invention costs a few lives!” (vii)—presents sacrifice as the unavoidable price of advancement. Donoghue spends the rest of the novel dismantling the complacency embedded within this statement. Rather than treating death as an abstract statistical inevitability, she individualizes the people absorbed into the machinery of progress, including the railway workers who are “decapitated, cut in two, or burst like tomatoes” (112) in the course of their everyday work. The novel importantly locates responsibility for the catastrophic train crash in economic systems designed to reward risk-taking. The disaster emerges from a bonus scheme that pressures workers to pursue contradictory goals simultaneously. Victor calculates the value of the Company’s promised 40-percent bonus, describing it as “the difference between Joséphine’s sigh and her smile, the gap between getting by and feeling rich” (33). For workers like Victor and Guillaume Pellerin, punctuality bonuses represent the fragile margin between hardship and security. The Company, therefore, creates conditions in which danger becomes economically rational. Drivers are rewarded for saving fuel while also maintaining punishing schedules, despite Victor’s recognition that the two demands are fundamentally incompatible.
The novel repeatedly emphasizes that technological progress conceals the labor producing it. First-Class passengers like Émile experience speed as exhilaration and luxury. Yet Donoghue juxtaposes this pleasure with the exhausting realities on the footplate. The men generating the thrill stand exposed to coal dust, freezing wind, and relentless pressure, working without even the protection of a cab. Progress appears glamorous only because the suffering underpinning it remains largely invisible to those benefiting from it.
The crash at Montparnasse ultimately extends these costs beyond the railway’s laborers and passengers, killing Marie Haguillard, a newspaper seller who cannot even afford to ride the train. Marie’s erasure by technology is reinforced in the novel’s closing scene, where a photographer composes the famous image of the crashed locomotive, cropping her remains out of the frame. The iconic image of Engine 721 that survives in postcards and history books exists precisely because the human consequences have been edited out of it.
The Possibilities of Connections with Strangers
Donoghue presents the Paris Express as a social space in which strangers are forced into forms of intimacy that ordinary life usually prevents. Inside the sealed carriages, proximity overrides the social rules and hierarchies that govern the streets outside. People of different classes, nationalities, races, and political beliefs meet and exchange diagnoses, fears, confessions, and care. Strangers discover obligations toward one another that exceed the rules of class and convention governing the wider world.
Marcelle de Heredia identifies the peculiar intimacy of railway travel early in the novel, stating, “A railway carriage is as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random” (45). While the comparison captures the closeness of the environment, a dinner party ordinarily implies social selection and some degree of compatibility between guests. The railway carriage, by contrast, forces accidental coexistence among people who would otherwise remain entirely separate. Donoghue exploits this randomness throughout the novel. A Cuban-French medical student sits opposite an American painter traumatized by racism, and a Russian émigrée shares a carriage with a pregnant, unmarried woman and an anarchist carrying a bomb. The railway dissolves the usual social boundaries of the city, creating encounters that urban life would prohibit.
Importantly, the novel does not romanticize these interactions as effortless or universally successful. Marcelle’s first attempt at diagnosing Jeanne’s illness demonstrates how concern can be misinterpreted as intrusion. Her insight is dismissed by Louise Sarazin-Levassor as arrogance by “a stupid girl with notions” (96). However, the novel later revisits the encounter when Louise seeks Marcelle out at Dreux. Henry’s reflection, “How little we know about the strangers we sit beside” (152), gains weight from this earlier miscommunication. The carriage rewards close attention to others while exposing the dangers of superficial assumptions. The relationship between Henry and Marcelle becomes one of the clearest examples of the potential of connection across differences. When Marcelle counsels Henry through his nosebleed, triggered by trauma and anxiety, Henry reflects, “This young lady is balm to his heart” (172). The consolation is meaningful because Marcelle has earned his trust, accumulated during their conversation.
These temporary bonds are tested when the train and its community face a crisis. When Blonska recognizes Mado’s lunch bucket holds a bomb, she fears losing “all of the other passengers—these already familiar faces in Front Third” (187). The phrasing acknowledges both the brevity and depth of her attachment. When Cécile’s labor stalls, Blonska calls directly on Mado—the woman she knows plans to kill them—to help save the child. Mado immediately responds, putting the bucket down and using the midwifery knowledge gained from her mother’s difficult births. The carriage Mado intended to destroy becomes the space where she delivers new life.
Donoghue’s vision of connections between strangers is neither sentimental nor utopian. Ultimately, the bonds created on the train dissolve as soon as the passengers reach their destination. Nevertheless, the novel suggests that even brief moments of recognition between strangers matter because they challenge the isolating social structures governing the world outside the carriage walls.
The Motivations for an Anarchist Mentality
The Paris Express presents anarchist violence as the distorted product of genuine social suffering. Mado’s plan to detonate a bomb on the train emerges from her father’s paralysis, her mother’s repeated stillbirths, poverty, labor exploitation and institutional indifference. Donoghue refuses the comforting simplification of treating terrorism as incomprehensible evil. Instead, she carefully traces how legitimate political grievance can harden into an ideology willing to sacrifice innocent lives, particularly when anger becomes entangled with fantasies of martyrdom and historical destiny.
When Mado first encounters Proudhon’s declaration that “Property is theft” (60), the phrase gives shape to her anger at social injustice and ignites her radicalization. Donoghue’s description of “the words [going] off like firecrackers in her brain” (60) anticipates the bomb later hidden in her lunch bucket. The political language of anarchism offers her a framework through which suffering is systemic, and therefore potentially transformable through action.
Donoghue refuses to caricature Mado’s political awakening. Even Blonska, the character who recognizes the danger the lunch bucket represents, identifies “something kindred in Mado Pelletier’s iron conviction and unstoppable momentum” (65). Blonska herself is politically engaged and deeply critical of social injustice. What separates them is not an awareness of suffering but the conclusions they draw from it. Blonska shares Mado’s grievances while believing that violent retaliation is not the key to meaningful change.
The novel depicts Mado’s turn toward terrorism as an emotional response rather than an ideological process. Mado’s account of watching Émile Henry’s execution describes a moment of identification and transmission: “As the guillotine’s blade dropped, some spark leapt between them. […] As if a torch dropped from his hand and it was she who snatched it up” (86). This imagery reveals that Mado is inspired by Henry to die spectacularly for a cause. Blonska perceives this danger when she realizes that Mado “won’t do anything to these passengers that she wouldn’t do to herself. She has the glow of a warrior going into battle” (189). Mado’s willingness to die intensifies the danger she poses as she can more easily rationalize the destruction of others within a supposedly larger historical purpose.
Ultimately, the train crash takes choice out of Mado’s hands and forces her to confront the egotism embedded in her anarchist mentality. The violence of the accident triggers a realization that she intended to kill the other passengers and herself because “she wanted glory” (258) and martyrdom. . Mado’s conclusion that it’s “Still a filthy world, but […] she’s going to have to leave it a little cleaner than she found it” (260), marks a shift to Blonska’s more mature stance on effecting social change. Rejecting the seductive spectacle of martyrdom, Mado recognizes that she can do more good through small acts of kindness and ethical labor, such as helping to deliver a stranger’s child.
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