Natural disaster
Fire and brimstone
Apr 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition
The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the Hurricane Katrina of its time
AT 9.30 on the morning of November 1st 1755, All Saints Day, an earthquake struck Lisbon while most of the population was at church. “I thought the whole city was sinking into the earth,” wrote a terrified English traveller. Those who could fled to the quayside and took to the boats. Ninety minutes later, a tsunami swept them away. Worse was to come. The cooking fires lit to celebrate the feast day spread in the high winds until almost all the city was ablaze. Within two hours, a European capital had been reduced to rubble, swept by floods and consumed by fire.
“Perhaps the Daemon of fear never spread so rapidly and so powerfully its terror upon the earth,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet who was only six years old at the time but could still recall, when he published his autobiography more than half a century later, how frightened he was at hearing of the earthquake. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote extensively about it. Britain's parliament gave the victims £100,000, an early example of disaster relief.
The great Lisbon earthquake was the first of a series of natural disasters to strike Europe in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a period when growing scientific observation was providing new explanations of the natural world to rival those of the church. Because it occurred on a major religious holiday it also set off the sharpest arguments about its cause and significance. Nicholas Shrady, an American travel writer and architectural critic, tries hard to bring to life what happened, though he does not really do justice to the earthquake's impact on contemporary thought. Which is a shame, for this was significant.
Its most influential interpreter was Voltaire. In his satirical novel, “Candide”, published four years later, the eponymous hero arrives in Lisbon as the earthquake begins. He and his tutor, Dr Pangloss, are made scapegoats by the Inquisition. Candide is flogged and his tutor hanged, though he survives the ordeal. Pangloss embodies the view that, if God made the world, He must have created “the best of all possible worlds”. Voltaire used the earthquake to attack deistic optimism.
This slender volume suggests that scientific and technical responses mattered as much as moral and philosophical ones. For the rebuilding, Lisbon's military engineers invented Europe's first earthquake-proof buildings (soldiers marched round them to test reactions to vibrations). The government sent detailed questionnaires to every parish asking, for instance, “Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another? Did the sea rise or fall?” Modern seismologists used the responses to those questionnaires to reconstruct in detail what happened. The science of seismology springs partly from the disaster. John Mitchell, an English physicist and astronomer, was inspired by it to put forward the first theories of wave motion in the earth.
But Portugal was the main battleground between religious and scientific explanations. The man in charge of reconstruction, Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo (better known to history as the Marquis of Pombal), was one of Portugal's great modernisers. He not only needed, as he put it, to “bury the dead and feed the living”: he also had to save Lisbon from rivals who were urging the king to move the capital to Portugal's main source of wealth, Rio de Janeiro. Pombal reasserted order, organised food and shelter, and approved a rebuilding project now recognised as one of the great 18th-century urban plans.
But parts of the church viewed the earthquake as God's punishment. An influential Jesuit, Gabriel Malagrida, published his “Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake”, arguing that rebuilding was an offence against God. The Jesuits sought to prevent reconstruction. The conflict between clerical and secular authorities came to a head with an assassination attempt on the king, organised by a family to whom Malagrida acted as confessor. Eventually, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, and Malagrida garrotted and then burned. Pombal went on to reorganise Portuguese education, trade and law.
But modernisation was not to last. On the death of the king, reaction set in. Pombal was stripped of his posts and banned from coming within 20 miles of the new queen. She, it was said, had temper tantrums at the mere mention of the man who had saved her capital.
AT 9.30 on the morning of November 1st 1755, All Saints Day, an earthquake struck Lisbon while most of the population was at church. “I thought the whole city was sinking into the earth,” wrote a terrified English traveller. Those who could fled to the quayside and took to the boats. Ninety minutes later, a tsunami swept them away. Worse was to come. The cooking fires lit to celebrate the feast day spread in the high winds until almost all the city was ablaze. Within two hours, a European capital had been reduced to rubble, swept by floods and consumed by fire.
“Perhaps the Daemon of fear never spread so rapidly and so powerfully its terror upon the earth,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet who was only six years old at the time but could still recall, when he published his autobiography more than half a century later, how frightened he was at hearing of the earthquake. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote extensively about it. Britain's parliament gave the victims £100,000, an early example of disaster relief.
The great Lisbon earthquake was the first of a series of natural disasters to strike Europe in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a period when growing scientific observation was providing new explanations of the natural world to rival those of the church. Because it occurred on a major religious holiday it also set off the sharpest arguments about its cause and significance. Nicholas Shrady, an American travel writer and architectural critic, tries hard to bring to life what happened, though he does not really do justice to the earthquake's impact on contemporary thought. Which is a shame, for this was significant.
Its most influential interpreter was Voltaire. In his satirical novel, “Candide”, published four years later, the eponymous hero arrives in Lisbon as the earthquake begins. He and his tutor, Dr Pangloss, are made scapegoats by the Inquisition. Candide is flogged and his tutor hanged, though he survives the ordeal. Pangloss embodies the view that, if God made the world, He must have created “the best of all possible worlds”. Voltaire used the earthquake to attack deistic optimism.
This slender volume suggests that scientific and technical responses mattered as much as moral and philosophical ones. For the rebuilding, Lisbon's military engineers invented Europe's first earthquake-proof buildings (soldiers marched round them to test reactions to vibrations). The government sent detailed questionnaires to every parish asking, for instance, “Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another? Did the sea rise or fall?” Modern seismologists used the responses to those questionnaires to reconstruct in detail what happened. The science of seismology springs partly from the disaster. John Mitchell, an English physicist and astronomer, was inspired by it to put forward the first theories of wave motion in the earth.
But Portugal was the main battleground between religious and scientific explanations. The man in charge of reconstruction, Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo (better known to history as the Marquis of Pombal), was one of Portugal's great modernisers. He not only needed, as he put it, to “bury the dead and feed the living”: he also had to save Lisbon from rivals who were urging the king to move the capital to Portugal's main source of wealth, Rio de Janeiro. Pombal reasserted order, organised food and shelter, and approved a rebuilding project now recognised as one of the great 18th-century urban plans.
But parts of the church viewed the earthquake as God's punishment. An influential Jesuit, Gabriel Malagrida, published his “Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake”, arguing that rebuilding was an offence against God. The Jesuits sought to prevent reconstruction. The conflict between clerical and secular authorities came to a head with an assassination attempt on the king, organised by a family to whom Malagrida acted as confessor. Eventually, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, and Malagrida garrotted and then burned. Pombal went on to reorganise Portuguese education, trade and law.
But modernisation was not to last. On the death of the king, reaction set in. Pombal was stripped of his posts and banned from coming within 20 miles of the new queen. She, it was said, had temper tantrums at the mere mention of the man who had saved her capital.
