Guillaume Pepy, head of the SNCF rail service, told reporters: “We don’t yet know the reasons for this derailment.”
The rail service, judicial authorities and France’s BEA safety agency would each be investigating, said Pepy, clearly shaken by the scale of the destruction.
Director of security at SNCF Alain Krakovitch praised the quick reaction of the train driver.
Having felt the train jolting as it entered the station, he sent out the regulation warning signals by radio and by flashing a light, thus stopping all traffic in the area.
His quick thinking had avoided any collision with approaching trains, Krakovitch told reporters.
On Friday evening President Francois Hollande visited the scene and announced the three separate investigations.
But he added: “We should avoid unnecessary speculation. What happened will eventually be known and the proper conclusions will be drawn.”
Officials said the derailment happened at 5:14 pm (1514 GMT), minutes after the intercity train left the Paris-Austerlitz station.
“The train arrived at the station at high speed. It split in two for an unknown reason. Part of the train continued to roll while the other was left on its side on the platform,” a police source told AFP.
Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier, who also visited the crash site, said the train had been travelling at 137 kilometres an hour (85 miles per hour) at the time of the crash.
That was below the 150 kph limit for that part of the track.
Some 300 firefighters, 20 paramedic teams and eight helicopters were deployed to treat casualties at the scene and airlift the most seriously injured to nearby hospitals.
In total, 192 people were treated by emergency services, officials said. There were 385 passengers on the train, which means it was not overcrowded.
The accident occurred as many in France were departing for the start of their summer holidays ahead of Bastille Day on Sunday.
In Brussels, EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso expressed his condolences in a message to to Hollande.
The derailment was France’s worst rail accident since an SNCF commuter train crashed into a stationary train at Paris’s Gare de Lyon terminal in 1988, killing 56 people.
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