Terra Incognita. Alain Corbin
danger, and bearing their crosses and their relics of saints, and invoking the mercy of God in a loud voice, all marched […] into the bedroom I occupied. […] What a downpour! What winds! What lightning! What deep thunder! What frightening tremors! What roaring of the sea! What shrieking of the populace!2
A century later, Bindo, the Sienese ambassador to Naples, described an earthquake that struck the city on 4 December 1456: ‘The great cries, the laments, the great wailing and shouting of men, women and children who ran naked out of their homes in the dead of night, clasping their infants to their necks …’. Such terrifying displays of the earth’s powers were experienced in a climate of fear, explored some decades ago by Jean Delumeau.3 Contemporaries read them as interventions by the hand of God, or secondarily as the work of demons. In the cultural background were episodes of Biblical violence, from the Flood (a point we will return to at length) to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and, most importantly, the Apocalypse. Faced with disaster – the term ‘catastrophe’ was not yet in use – contemporaries influenced by sermons and other religious practices read such events as scourges intended to punish sinners. On a population level, psychological reactions were driven by the urge to save the souls not only of individuals, but of society as a whole. In a world where entering Paradise was the ultimate purpose of life, divine wrath seemed quite logical.
As Thomas Labbé points out, in this perspective, natural chaos was by no means blamed on God; a feeling that the punishment was fair and just and the need for preservation were enough to avoid such a reaction. At that point in time, events were interpreted above all on a local scale, in urban and rural areas alike. Anywhere further afield was barely taken into account, if at all. The materiality of the disaster did not become central to people’s concerns until the fifteenth or even early sixteenth century, when disaster culture began to emerge.4
Yet there was a gradual change in perspective between the late medieval period in the fifteenth century and 1755, when this book opens. Multiple earthquakes were recorded in this period, with at least twenty-seven causing major damage between 1600 and 1800. Interpretations began to shift early in the period. Disasters were still considered to be God’s work, but they were seen less as manifestations of divine wrath – and therefore as punishment – than as signs of His mercy, saving men’s souls from damnation. Many prodigious events were interpreted in a similar light.5
A further process that helped soften the harshness of divine punishment was that second causes gradually came to be taken into account. This was the belief that God rarely intervened directly in nature, instead letting it work on its own. The seventeenth century saw the development of a reading of divine intervention crucial to understanding the period under study, which I highlighted in a previous work: the physico-theology of Oxford’s Protestant scholars, underpinned by the regular Anglican practice of reading the Psalms daily. This school, known on the continent as ‘natural theology’, studied at length by Henri Brémond,6 considered the earth as a marvel corresponding to God’s plan. It was to be exalted for its beauty, overlooking the brutality it sometimes displayed. This sense of wonderment gave rise to the Providentialism celebrated by the Abbé Pluche and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Prior to the Great Lisbon Earthquake, a series of questions came to change sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images of the Flood, though it remained an accepted historical fact for everyone with the exception of Leonardo da Vinci. Questions gradually arose about how it happened and whether all the consequences associated with it were even possible. Was it one single flood, or were there several? It must be acknowledged that such questions were asked only by an elite few. This was society’s solid bedrock of beliefs and questions on 1 November 1755, when Lisbon was struck by a catastrophe (the word was first used in French in its modern sense in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes [Persian Letters] in 1721).7 My aim is not to write a history of the earthquake, but it is important to outline it in some detail to shed light on the history of the stratification of ignorance, thrown into sharp focus by the event.8
Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre has argued that from 1755, or roughly mid-century, on, disasters were no longer mere signs, but events in their own right: ‘It progressively became a concept that made for a brand-new way of thinking about the world and about mankind.’9 Stripped of their religious frame of reference, disasters were now open to analysis. Thinking about and trying to understand catastrophes was no longer the sole preserve of the church. That said, a degree of caution was still required. The idea of divine punishment, the fear of everlasting damnation, and the primary goal of salvation had by no means faded from people’s minds. Disasters may now have been considered suitable material for analysis, but they were still a reminder of the transience of life, the gift of a merciful God.
On All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1755, Lisbon was shaken by four major tremors in nine minutes, starting at twenty to ten in the morning. Clouds of sulphurous vapour darkened the sky. A few moments later, a tidal wave – what we would now call a tsunami – five to six metres in height ploughed across the city, causing devastation in its wake. An aftershock struck at around eleven. Fire ravaged the city for five to six days. Looters caused further panic. The worst-affected areas were the low-lying neighbourhoods in the city centre. It is currently estimated that some ten thousand people died. Few of them were from the city’s leading families, who were on their country estates. The king and the royal family were in residence at the Belém Palace.
Though in relative decline at the time, Lisbon was still at this point Europe’s third most important port, after Amsterdam and London. Vast quantities of merchandise were destroyed. Worse, perhaps, in the eyes of the men and women of one of Europe’s great Catholic capitals, sixteen churches collapsed, including the patriarchal cathedral. The opera house and thirty-three townhouses belonging to aristocratic families were also destroyed.
We will now focus for a while on how word of the disaster spread. While the tremors themselves were felt across much of Western Europe, it took around a month for the news to reach gazettes and news-sheets. In Germany, a Cologne gazette was first to break the news, on 21 November. The Gazette de France [France Gazette] printed it the following day. By the end of the month, the news had reached most of the German-language press. Until February 1756, the ‘disaster’ was often described as a ‘dreadful catastrophe’, with articles highlighting the scale of the destruction. On 29 November 1755, for instance, a gazette in Bern recorded that ‘seven-eighths of the houses in the city of Lisbon were torn down in six or seven minutes’. It informed its readers that three volcanoes had caused a fire and that 100 to 130 locals had found themselves trapped in the ruins. The total destruction of trade in one of Europe’s busiest commercial cities was the focus of much interest. News-sheets and almanacs soon followed suit, eager to shed sensational light on the parlous state of the world with many a Biblical reference. Though the term ‘catastrophe’ was widely used in the press in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, the much-discussed news of the disaster does not seem to have profoundly challenged an optimistic world view and the idea of God’s providence, particularly in Germany.
The history of the earthquake involves the event itself, its impact, and the subterranean mechanisms that cause such tremors. Societies of the past – the eighteenth century, in this case – did not know what caused the earthquakes they frequently experienced: as we have seen, between 1600 and 1800, at least twenty-seven quakes caused considerable damage. The 1750s were the second major period of seismic activity since the seventeenth century, even before the Lisbon disaster. Not knowing what caused the tremors was difficult to live with and the disastrous consequences were hard to overcome. Since the numerous sources on earthquakes had no idea what caused them, their principal focus was on the local impact, damage, institutional reaction to the chaos, how the news spread, and on recording the memory of the disaster. The folk memory of earthquakes was also focused on the destruction of urban centres. The many earthquakes that shook France in the seventeenth century were almost completely forgotten, remembered at most locally or regionally. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, earthquakes across France were recorded in hundreds of narratives, scholarly and academic debates and dozens of articles in periodicals, maps and catalogues. Scholars began to study the country’s seismic activity. The years 1755–64 represent