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If you are looking for the kind of 'you are there' description of the earthquake and the fire and tsunamis that followed, you will not really find that here. However, this still is a very readable and interesting book, linking the Lisbon earthquake to a host of interrelated topics including: how this disaster was truly the first national disaster with an international charitable relief response, how awareness of this disaster challenged current religious and philosophical views (and led Voltaire to write his greatest work criticizing then popular "Optimism") and how the history of the Iberian lands led to the politics surrounding the rebuilding of Lisbon. The backdrop of Portugese history alone is worth the read.
As in all disasters or diseases, there were those who knew that God was sending a message to those afflicted. It was a stylistic death-blow to deistic optimism.It also was part of a new mood of skepticism that encouraged scientific explanations of catastrophes rather than religious explanations. In 1759, Voltaire published _Candide_, a rollicking, bawdy, fast-moving tale of inexplicable ups-and-downs, including the main characters' presence in the Lisbon earthquake. Every traveler noted how pious the inhabitants were, but many of them were in church when the disaster began, first with tremors, then violent waves from the sea, then from fire from all the household fireplaces that were beneath the collapsed buildings. In _The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755_ (Viking) Nicholas Shrady gives a compelling short account of the disaster itself, and the history of the events leading up to it, but spends far more of the pages in a fascinating description of the effects of the quake in local and global history.
Shrady says that because of this particular disaster in a particular place, all people all over the world "from staunch clerics to enlightened philosophers were compelled to re-examine their most cherished dogmas." We are still living with some of the changes the earthquake wrought.José I may have been king, but Portugal was largely ruled by the church which was the largest landowner and which supported the justly-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition. A new city was designed from scratch, on an enlightened rational grid that became a model for the future rebuilding of Paris. There were repercussions for science, religion, philosophy, politics, and literature. The message, however, did not make sense.
The book made fun not only of Leibnitz's philosophy, but of the Church, the Inquisition, the nobility, the military, and more. The Lisbon earthquake, then, was the beginning of seismology. Ten percent of the populace was wiped out. Lisbon was no worse than any large city, and demonstrably more pious than the others. Shrady writes that the "disaster would also usher in a new era, one in which a wholesome sense of doubt and the powers of reason would replace the certainties of religious dogma, and the numbing resignation that providence instilled would give way to the liberation of human promise." But he also reminds us that the new era is not completely arrived, for there will always be those that take sanctimonious satisfaction in the punishment God deals out to others.
The earthquake that hit Lisbon on 1 November 1755 shook up a lot more than its buildings and citizens. It isn't surprising that governments tried to suppress it, and also not surprising that it became a bestseller. There was no sense in trying to figure out how the world is the best possible one, the book shows; we must simply get on with the duties of our lives. Carvalho arranged for a survey to be widely distributed, to document how people perceived the earthquake and its effects, answering questions like "Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another." or "Did the sea rise or fall first." The undulating waves of the ground reported by many who survived may have triggered the first ideas that earthquakes spread as waves; the first theories of wave motion within the Earth were put forward by English physicist John Mitchell in 1760. The changes in thinking were not just religious, but more broadly philosophical. The retired archbishop of New Orleans, for instance, insisted that hurricane Katrina was deserved chastisement for sexual attitudes, abortions, and drug addiction. There have been bigger disasters, even in our own times, but this one was not only big, but it made gigantic differences even in the way humans looked at their place in the world.
Lisbon's lessons are not yet universal. The flawed hero of this book, the Portuguese Secretary of State, Sebastião Carvalho, realized that blaming people's sinfulness for the disaster would only undercut his efforts to bring them together to surmount it. The most famous changes came in Voltaire's reaction to the ideas of Leibnitz, who reasoned that if the world was the product of a benevolent and all-powerful God, then it must be the best of all possible worlds, no matter how hard it is for us to see the goodness. Military engineers constructed the first buildings in Europe designed to withstand earthquakes.
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