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Notes from Underground: Lisbon After the Earthquake CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Birkbeck Institutional Research Online Richard Hamblyn Notes from Underground: Lisbon after the Earthquake I arrived at Lisbon just in time to hear the which he argued that the occasional tremor was house crack over my head in an earthquake. the price that mankind was obliged to pay for This is the seventh shock that has been felt the otherwise beneficial subterranean forces since the first of November. They had a that generated hot springs and mineral ores, smart shock on the 17th of this month, but while for Voltaire, notoriously, the episode the Connoisseurs in earthquakes say, that proved ‘the sad and ancient truth, recognised by this last, though of shorter duration, was all men, that evil walks the earth’, a reflection the most dangerous, for this was the that prompted Adorno’s comment (in the perpendicular shake, whereas the other was course of his essay ‘After Auschwitz’) that ‘the the undulatory motion. earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire Robert Southey, Letters Written during a short of the theodicy of Leibniz.’2 As Susan Neiman Residence in Spain and Portugal (2 vols, Bristol, observed, in her introduction to Evil in Modern 1797), i. 260 Thought (2002), ‘the eighteenth century used The earthquake and tsunami which devastated the word Lisbon much as we use the word the city of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 have Auschwitz today . it takes no more than the come to occupy a canonical place in name of a place to mean: the collapse of the Enlightenment historiography, the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that transformative nature of the episode’s make civilization possible.’3 wide-ranging religious, philosophical and But in spite of the centrality of the scientific repercussions having served to define destruction of Lisbon to the history of the it as the first great test of emerging development of European thought, surprisingly Enlightenment values. ‘Perhaps the demon of little attention has been paid to the complex terror had never so speedily and powerfully history of the city’s physical reconstitution diffused his terrors over the earth’, as Goethe in the decades following the earthquake, recalled in the opening pages of Dichtung und and even less to the series of contested Wahrheit (1811), and he credited the universal meanings, memories and reflections that shock of the earthquake with the unprecedented the radical redesign of Lisbon provoked, both outbreak of scholarly attention that was soon among its surviving citizens and its stream of being paid to the neighbouring, if quarrelsome, foreign visitors.4 Southey, for example (as will discourses of theodicy and natural philosophy.1 shortly be seen), was not alone in feeling that Within a year of the event, Immanuel Kant had the once golden city had suffered a secondary published a trio of natural-philosophical essays disaster in the form of its austere rectilinear on the earthquake’s seismic significance, in reconstruction, while Henry Matthews, the Notes from Underground: Lisbon after the Earthquake 109 travelling invalid, was also not alone in viewing 90,000 dead, from a population of just over a the rebuilt city as seismically doomed: ‘repeated quarter of a million.6 ‘It is not to be express’d shocks have been felt of late years’, he reported, by human tongue how dreadful and how awful ‘and to an earthquake it may look, as its natural it was’, as a letter from an eyewitness described death.’5 This was, in fact, a widely-held view of the scene: ‘Terror in beholding frightful a city that, though it had been rebuilt to a novel pyramids of ruined fronts, some inclining one antiseismic design, continued to be shaken way, some another; then horror in beholding by powerful aftershocks for decades after the dead bodies by six or seven in a heap, crush’d to event. death, half buried and half burnt; and if one This paper sets out to explore the competing went through the broad places or squares, imaginative geographies of Lisbon that nothing to be met with but people bewailing emerged in the wake of the city’s their misfortunes, wringing their hands, and reconstruction, spanning the technological crying: the world is at an end.’7 optimism of the planners and surveyors, the Within a matter of days, however, the theological objections of certain sections of the survivors’ mood had apparently changed, and clergy, and the aesthetic reactions of later though Lisbon remained ‘one continued heap foreign travellers, for whom Lisbon remained of rubbish and ruins’, as a letter written on an enduring symbol of violent subterranean 20 November described it, ‘notwithstanding transformation, both physical and that, they talk of nothing but rebuilding it.’8 philosophical. In fact the clearance process had already begun, under the energetic direction of Portugal’s reforming first minister, Sebastião José de The Pombaline Reconstruction Carvalho e Mello (the future Marquis of At around 9:40 a.m. on All Saints Day, 1755, a Pombal), and by the end of the following powerful offshore earthquake with a likely summer most of the ruins of central Lisbon had epicentre some 200 km southwest of the city, been removed, leaving a flat, evacuated central suddenly and noisily reduced much of Lisbon’s area of some 200,000 square metres: Lisbon’s elegant fabric to rubble. As a series of fires ground zero. Since the alluvial soil beneath this broke out among the ruins, caused mainly by low-lying area had been churned into unstable the large number of votive candles that had mud by the combined effects of the earthquake been lit to mark the religious holiday, hundreds and tsunami, a consignment of 20,000 timber of survivors made their way down to the pylons was shipped down from Hamburg and Terreiro do Paço (‘Palace Terrace’), Lisbon’s hammered into the sodden ground as upright spacious ceremonial square, on the north shore antiseismic stabilisers. The new streets and of the Tagus estuary. Some forty minutes later, buildings of the Baixa Pombalina (as the new however, a series of powerful tsunami waves city centre would soon be known) would then (precipitated by the submarine earthquake) be constructed, Venice-like, on a series of funneled through the neck of the estuary and mortar boards fixed to the summits of this surged into downtown Lisbon, drowning many sunken northern pine forest. of the refugees who had sought sanctuary in But as the clearance continued into the the riverside square. The fires, meanwhile, had 1760 s, doubts began to be raised concerning the coalesced into a powerful crescent of flame that scale and cost of the planned reconstruction, as burned for a week, consuming most of what well as the scheme’s wider moral foundations. was left of the ruined city centre. Estimates of In September 1760, for example, the Italian casualties range from between 15,000 and writer Guiseppe Baretti, on his way home to 110 Romanticism Genoa after ten years in London, spent a week their common sense when they abandon in Lisbon (‘a city not to be rebuilt in haste’, as themselves so much to their fiery imaginations’ he described it), at the end of which he sadly (Baretti, i. 101). The earthquake not only concluded that ‘if half the people that have destroyed the city while disabling the nation’s escaped the earthquake, were to be employed in infrastructure, it also undermined the morale of nothing else but in the removal of that the survivors themselves, leaving them in a immense rubbish, it is not very clear that they state of helpless excitation. would be able to remove it in ten years.’9 He As it turned out, however, Baretti need not worried, too, where the materials for rebuilding have worried about the availability of marble or the shattered city would be found: ‘It is true, brick, since neither would be widely used in the that the country round abounds with marble rebuilding. The choice of materials, as well as of enough to build twenty Lisbons. But still, that the design for the replacement city, were made marble must be cut out of the quarry, must be by Pombal and his team of military engineers, shaped, must be carried to town. And is all this following a lengthy consultation period, during to be done in a little time? and by people who which – according to the detailed minutes kept have lost in the conflagration whatever tools by General Manuel de Maia (Pombal’s chief they had?’ And even were the city to be rebuilt military surveyor) – a variety of historical in brick rather than marble, Baretti pointed out precedents were discussed. These included the that ‘the making millions of millions of bricks reconstruction of London after the fire of 1666; (even supposing the proper clay quite at hand) the rebuilding of Noto (Sicily) on a nearby area is not the work of a day. And kilns must be of safer ground, following its destruction by an erected, and wood must be got to burn them. earthquake in 1693; and the creation of Turin’s But where is that wood, in which I am told the rectilinear new town as an adjunct to the old country is far from abounding? And where are city during the early 18th century (see the thousands of brick-makers to make those Maxwell, 29–30). All these competing urban numberless millions of bricks? Yet give them precedents were eventually rejected in favour of brick-makers, clay, and wood as much will the more radical raze and rebuild approach, of suffice, where is the lime, the iron, and the the kind that Christopher Wren had proposed other materials?’ (Baretti, i.
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