Notes from Underground: Lisbon after the Earthquake

I arrived at Lisbon just in time to hear the house crack over my head in an earthquake. This is the seventh shock that has been felt since the first of November. They had a smart shock on the 17th of this month, but the Connoisseurs in earthquakes say, that this last, though of shorter duration, was the most dangerous, for this was the perpendicular shake, whereas the other was the undulatory motion.

Robert Southey, Letters Written during a short Residence in Spain and Portugal (2 vols, Bristol, 1797), i. 260

The earthquake and tsunami which devastated the city of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 have come to occupy a canonical place in Enlightenment historiography, the transformative nature of the episode's wide-ranging religious, philosophical and scientific repercussions having served to define it as the first great test of emerging Enlightenment values. 'Perhaps the demon of terror had never so speedily and powerfully diffused his terrors over the earth', as Goethe recalled in the opening pages of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), and he credited the universal shock of the earthquake with the unprecedented outbreak of scholarly attention that was soon being paid to the neighbouring, if quarrelsome, discourses of theodicy and natural philosophy.¹ Within a year of the event, Immanuel Kant had published a trio of natural-philosophical essays on the earthquake's seismic significance, in which he argued that the occasional tremor was the price that mankind was obliged to pay for the otherwise beneficial subterranean forces that generated hot springs and mineral ores, while for Voltaire, notoriously, the episode proved 'the sad and ancient truth, recognised by all men, that evil walks the earth', a reflection that prompted Adorno's comment (in the course of his essay 'After Auschwitz') that 'the earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz.'² As Susan Neiman observed, in her introduction to Evil in Modern Thought (2002), 'the eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today . . . it takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that make civilization possible.'³

But in spite of the centrality of the destruction of Lisbon to the history of the development of European thought, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the complex history of the city's physical reconstitution in the decades following the earthquake, and even less to the series of contested meanings, memories and reflections that the radical redesign of Lisbon provoked, both among its surviving citizens and its stream of foreign visitors.⁴ Southey, for example (as will shortly be seen), was not alone in feeling that the once golden city had suffered a secondary disaster in the form of its austere rectilinear reconstruction, while Henry Matthews, the travelling invalid, was also not alone in viewing the rebuilt city as seismically doomed: 'repeated shocks have been felt of late years', he reported, 'and to an earthquake it may look, as its natural death.'⁵ This was, in fact, a widely-held view of a city that, though it had been rebuilt to a novel antiseismic design, continued to be shaken by powerful aftershocks for decades after the event.

This paper sets out to explore the competing imaginative geographies of Lisbon that emerged in the wake of the city's reconstruction, spanning the technological optimism of the planners and surveyors, the theological objections of certain sections of the clergy, and the aesthetic reactions of later foreign travellers, for whom Lisbon remained an enduring symbol of violent subterranean transformation, both physical and philosophical.

The Pombaline Reconstruction

At around 9:40 a.m. on All Saints Day, 1755, a powerful offshore earthquake with a likely epicentre some 200 km southwest of the city, suddenly and noisily reduced much of Lisbon's elegant fabric to rubble. As a series of fires broke out among the ruins, caused mainly by the large number of votive candles that had been lit to mark the religious holiday, hundreds of survivors made their way down to the Terreiro do Paço...