Paris Montparnasse Train
Montparnasse exterior
Station statistics
Coordinates	48°50′24″N 2°19′07″E / 48.84°N 2.31861°E / 48.84; 2.31861Coordinates: 48°50′24″N 2°19′07″E / 48.84°N 2.31861°E / 48.84; 2.31861
Lines	Paris–Brest railway
Other information
Opened	10 September 1840
Owned by	RFF / SNCF
Traffic
Passengers ()	50 million
Services
Preceding station   SNCF   Following station Terminus TGV Massy TGV toward western and southwestern France Terminus Intercités Dreux toward Granville Terminus TER Basse-Normandie 2 Dreux toward Granville Terminus TER Haute-Normandie Versailles-Chantiers toward L'Aigle Versailles-Chantiers toward Le Mans TER Pays de la Loire 23 Terminus Terminus Transilien Vanves-Malakoff toward Dreux, Mantes-la-Jolie or Rambouillet

Paris Montparnasse is one of the six large terminus railway stations of Paris, located in the Montparnasse area in the XIVe arrondissement. The station was opened in 1840, and rebuilt completely in 1969.^[1] A steam train crashed through the station in 1895; there is a well-known photograph of the event, and full scale reproductions outside a museum chain in South America.^[2]

The station is used for the intercity TGV trains to destinations in the west and south-west of France including Tours, Bordeaux, Rennes and Nantes. Additionally, it is served by several suburban and regional services on the Transilien Paris – Montparnasse routes. There is also a metro station.

History[link]

The original station opened in 1840, and was named Gare de l'Ouest,^[3] before later being renamed. A second station was built between 1848 and 1852.

On 25 August 1944, the German military governor of Paris, General von Choltitz, surrendered his garrison to the French General Philippe Leclerc at the old train station, after disobeying Adolf Hitler's direct order to destroy the city (see Liberation of Paris).

During the 1960s, a newer station integrated into a complex of office buildings was built. In 1969, the old station was torn down and the Tour Montparnasse built on its spot. An extension was built in 1990 to host the TGV Atlantique.

• 

  Concourse of the station

• 

  Platform of the station

1895 derailment[link]

Granville–Paris Express wreck on 22 October 1895. The original Gare de l'Ouest name of the station is visible on the outside of the building.

The Gare Montparnasse became famous for a derailment on 22 October 1895 of the Granville–Paris Express that overran the buffer stop. The engine careened across almost 30 metres (100 ft) of the station concourse, crashed through a 60-centimetre (2 ft) thick wall, shot across a terrace and smashed out of the station, plummeting onto the Place de Rennes 10 metres (33 ft) below, where it stood on its nose. Two of the 131 passengers sustained injuries, along with the fireman and two conductors. The only fatality was a woman on the street below who was killed by falling masonry.^[4] The accident was caused by a faulty Westinghouse brake and the engine drivers who were trying to make up for lost time.^[5] A conductor was given a 25-franc fine and the engine driver a 50-franc fine.

The story of the train crash and the picture features in the 2007 children's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick and in its film adaptation, Hugo, where it was in one of Hugo's nightmares.^[6] The picture of the accident is also used as cover page for a book named An Introduction to Error Analysis by John Taylor. The story of the 1895 accident was also referenced in the television series Thomas and Friends in "A Better View For Gordon". The event is also depicted in the comic book The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.^[7]

Replicas of the train crash are recreated outside the Mundo a Vapor ("Steam World") museum chain buildings in Brazil, at the southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, in the city of Canela.^[8]

Lines serving this station[link]

Adjacent metro station:

• Montparnasse - Bienvenüe

Nearby station:

• Pasteur

Travelling between the Gare Montparnasse and other Paris main line stations[link]

• Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est: take Métro Line 4
• Gare Saint-Lazare: take Métro Line 12 or 13 (line 13 is better since there are fewer corridors to cross).
• Gare de Lyon and Gare d'Austerlitz: take bus 91

See also[link]

Paris portal

• Transportation in France
• List of stations of the Paris RER
• List of stations of the Paris Métro
• Gare d'Austerlitz
• Gare de l'Est
• Gare de Lyon
• Gare du Nord
• Gare Saint-Lazare
• Largs Rail Crash - a rail crash at Largs railway station in Scotland, with similar circumstances to the crash at Gare Montparnasse.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gare de Paris-Montparnasse

• Gare Montparnasse- current photographs and of the years 1900.
• Satellite image from Google Maps
• Mundo a Vapor Museum The Brazilian museum which contains the 1895 derailment accident replica.

v t e Paris rail stations Termini Operating Austerlitz Bercy Est Lyon Montparnasse Nord Saint-Lazare Closed Bastille Orsay SNCF stations Pont-Cardinet RER stations Line A Charles de Gaulle – Étoile Auber Châtelet – Les Halles Lyon Nation Line B Nord Châtelet – Les Halles St-Michel-Notre-Dame Luxembourg Port-Royal Denfert-Rochereau Cité Universitaire Line C Porte de Clichy Pereire – Levallois Neuilly – Porte Maillot Avenue Foch Avenue Henri Martin Boulainvilliers Avenue du Président Kennedy Pont du Garigliano Javel Champ de Mars - Tour Eiffel Pont de l'Alma Invalides Musée d'Orsay Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame Austerlitz Bibliothèque François Mitterrand Line D Nord Châtelet – Les Halles Lyon Line E Haussmann – Saint-Lazare Magenta See also: List of stations of the Paris Métro, Tramways in Île-de-France, and Transport in Paris. There is also an external interactive map.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

Rue de Rennes, in the background the Tour Montparnasse

Montparnasse (French pronunciation: [mɔ̃paʁnas]) is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse was absorbed into the capital's 6th and 14th arrondissements in 1669.

The area also gives its name to:

• Gare Montparnasse – trains to Brittany, TGV to Rennes, Tours, Bordeaux, Le Mans; rebuilt as a modern TGV station;
• The large Montparnasse – Bienvenüe métro station;
• Cimetière du Montparnasse – the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Charles Baudelaire, Constantin Brâncuşi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Susan Sontag are buried
• Tour Montparnasse, a lone skyscraper.

The Pasteur Institute is located in the area. Beneath the ground are tunnels of the Catacombs of Paris.

The name Montparnasse stems from the nickname "Mount Parnassus" (In Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses – the Muses – of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighbourhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry.

The hill was levelled to construct the Boulevard Montparnasse in the 18th century. During the French Revolution many dance halls and cabarets opened their doors.

The area is also known for cafes and bars, such as the Breton restaurants specialising in crêpes (thin pancakes) located a few blocks from the Gare Montparnasse.

Artistic Montparnasse[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Like its counterpart Montmartre, Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as les Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. From 1910 to the start of World War II, Paris' artistic circles migrated to Montparnasse, an alternative to the Montmartre district which had been the intellectual breeding ground for the previous generation of artists. The Paris of Zola, Manet, France, Degas, Fauré, a group that had assembled more on the basis of status affinity than actual artistic tastes, indulging in the refinements of Dandyism, was at the opposite end of the economic, social, and political spectrum from the gritty, tough-talking, die-hard, emigrant artists that peopled Montparnasse.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios", seldom free of rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell for millions of euros.

In post WWI Paris, Montparnasse was a euphoric meeting ground for the artistic world. Fernand Léger wrote of that period: “man…relaxes and recaptures his taste for life, his frenzy to dance, to spend money…an explosion of life-force fills the world.” ^[1] They came to Montparnsse from all over the globe, from Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Carmelo Gonzalez, Julio Gonzalez, Moise Kisling, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marios Varvoglis, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Jean Rhys, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brâncuşi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, Angel Zarraga, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, André Breton, Alfonso Reyes, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran, Reginald Gray, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.

La Rotonde at night 2002

Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Leger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. While most of the artistic community gathered here were struggling to eke out an existence, well-heeled American socialites such as Peggy Guggenheim, and Edith Wharton from New York City, Harry Crosby from Boston and Beatrice Wood from San Francisco were caught in the fever of creativity. Robert McAlmon, and Maria and Eugene Jolas came to Paris and published their literary magazine Transition. Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse would establish the Black Sun Press in Paris in 1927, publishing works by such future luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and others. As well, Bill Bird published through his Three Mountains Press until British heiress Nancy Cunard took it over.

Cafés rented tables to poor artists for hours at a stretch. Several, including La Closerie des Lilas, remain in business today.

Le Dôme at night 2002

The cafés and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where ideas were hatched and mulled over. The cafés at the centre of Montparnasse's night-life were in the Carrefour Vavin, now renamed Place Pablo-Picasso. In Montparnasse's heyday (from 1910 to 1920), the cafés Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole—all of which are still in business— were the places where starving artists could occupy a table all evening for a few centimes. If they fell asleep, the waiters were instructed not to wake them. Arguments were common, some fuelled by intellect, others by alcohol, and if there were fights, and there often were, the police were never summoned. If you couldn't pay your bill, people such as La Rotonde's proprietor, Victor Libion, would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay. As such, there were times when the café's walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the world's greatest museums drool with envy.

There were many areas where the great artists congregated, one of them being near Le Dôme at no. 10 rue Delambre called the Dingo Bar. It was the hang-out of artists and expatriate Americans and the place where Canadian writer Morley Callaghan came with his friend Ernest Hemingway, both still unpublished writers, and met the already-established F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Man Ray's friend and Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, left for New York, Man Ray set up his first studio at l'Hôtel des Ecoles at no. 15 rue Delambre. This is where his career as a photographer began, and where James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and the others filed in and posed in black and white.

The rue de la Gaité in Montparnasse was the site of many of the great music-hall theatres, in particular the famous "Bobino".

Great artists performed at the Bobino Nightclub.

On their stages, using then-popular single name pseudonyms or one birth name only, Damia, Kiki, Mayol and Georgius, sang and performed to packed houses. And here too, Les Six was formed, creating music based on the ideas of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau.

The poet Max Jacob said he came to Montparnasse to "sin disgracefully", but Marc Chagall summed it up differently when he explained why he had gone to Montparnasse: "I aspired to see with my own eyes what I had heard of from so far away: this revolution of the eye, this rotation of colours, which spontaneously and astutely merge with one another in a flow of conceived lines. That could not be seen in my town. The sun of Art then shone only on Paris."

While the area attracted people who came to live and work in the creative, bohemian environment, it also became home for political exiles such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Porfirio Diaz, and Simon Petlyura. But, World War II forced the dispersal of the artistic society, and after the war Montparnasse never regained its splendour. Wealthy socialites like Peggy Guggenheim, who married artist Max Ernst, lived in the elegant section of Paris but frequented the studios of Montparnasse, acquiring pieces that would come to be recognzed as masterpieces that now hang in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy.

The Musée du Montparnasse opened in 1998 at 21 Avenue du Maine. Although operating with a tiny city grant, the museum is a non-profit operation.

Economy[link]

SNCF, the French rail company, has its head office in Montparnasse and the 14th arrondissement.^[2][3]

Prior to the completion of the current Air France head office in Tremblay-en-France in December 1995,^[4][5] Air France was headquartered in a tower located next to the Gare Montparnasse rail station in Montparnasse and in the 15th arrondissement; Air France had its headquarters in the tower for about 30 years.^[6][7][8]

Education[link]

The Vandamme Library (Bibliothèque Vandamme) is located in the neighborhood.^[9][10]

Further reading[link]

• Billy Kluver, Julie Martin Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930 (the definitive illustrated account of the golden age of Montparnasse.)
• Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, University of Texas at Austin, 1986
• Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930 by Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle (1968)

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (September 2009)

External links[link]

Paris portal

• La Rotonde Terasza, Paris (1917), by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) (scroll down to 5th painting).
• Homage to Friends from Montparnasse by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna), c.1962, oil/canvas, top left to right: Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, galerie owner Leopold Zborowski [1][2]; bottom left to right: Marevna, her and Diego Rivera's daughter Marika, (Amedeo Modigliani), Moise Kisling.
• "Legendary Sin Cities" — CBC television documentary
• The Montparnasse district - Photographs of the years 1900 at our days

Coordinates: 48°50′37.10″N 2°19′25.72″E / 48.843639°N 2.3238111°E / 48.843639; 2.3238111