Saturday, December 2, 2017
Lisbon Earthquake in 1755
In 1755 Lisbon experiences an earthquake that is referenced in Voltaire's Candide. This earthquake happened Saturday, November 1st, or all Saint's Day, in 1755 around 10 in the morning local time. The earthquake caused subsequent fires and tsunamis that demolished Lisbon and the surrounding areas in Portugal. Experts today say that the earthquake would have measure from an 8.5-9.0 on the Richter Scale. Estimates for the total death toll in Lisbon alone range from 10,000 to 100,000 people. This is obviously a very large range as it is difficult to calculate with precision the exact death toll from an event that happened in the mid-1700s. The earthquake reported lasted around three and a half minutes, causing 15 feet holes in the city center. Later that same day, a tsunami rushed up the Tagus river and engulfed the entire port and surrounding area. Shocks from the earthquake were felt in South Africa, Finland, Greenland, and the Caribbean. Tsunamis as high as 20 meters tall rose up on the North African coast. Experts say that this earthquake destroyed over 85% of Lisbon's buildings and structures. As we can see the earthquake that was mentioned by Voltaire was a very real event that had very dire consequences.
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The Lisbon Earthquake is a really interesting topic especially given the immense influence it had on thinkers like Voltaire and other philosophers. Doing some quick research on the earthquake, many philosophers were nearly obsessed with it. Kant, for example, collected as much information as he possibly could on the earthquake and published pamphlets that included a theory for a scientific explanation of earthquake. In addition to its role in Candide, Voltaire published a poem called "Une poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne." Such an inexplicably terrible natural disaster shocked many thinkers. I think this is interesting in how there was apparently some tension between the clergy and other members of society, as shown in the auto-da-fé, and those who saw the earthquake as an example of the lack of close divine intervention in the world. The effect of this catastrophe was profound; I've found some historians compare the intellectual impact of it to that of the Holocaust on Modernist and Postmodernist thinkers in the 20th century. It's remarkable how much this one natural disaster influenced European philosophy so fundamentally.
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