Wrath of God: The Story of the Great Lisbon
Earthquake of 1755 by Edward Paice
(London: Quercus Publishing, 2008)

R.J. STOVE lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a Contributing Editor of The American Conservative.

The greatest natural calamity ever to
befall Europe started shortly after
9:30 a.m. on November 1, 1755. At that
moment, Lisbon began to tremble, and it
continued trembling for two minutes, as
if with an irrepressible fever. Then came
a second quake, lasting six minutes. And
then, the third and worst quake, now
known to have measured between 8.75
and 9 on the Richter scale. Territories as
far afield as Scotland and Finland felt the
aftershocks. Within an hour of this third
onslaught, the Tagus River reared up into
a relentless succession of three tidal waves,
pounding all in their path, like the fists of
giants. Over most of the next week, fires
consumed whatever water spared. When
the crisis passed, nine-tenths of Europe’s
fourth-largest city lay waste, a necropolis
of rubble and ash. At least 40,000 persons
perished, whether crushed, drowned,
or incinerated. Some reports give a body
count of 80,000. However computed, the
figures are too great to register on our
emotions. Nature’s rage anticipated Stalin’s
jocund dictum: “One death is a tragedy, a
million deaths is a statistic.”

Edward Paice, whose previous publications
include a travel guide to (of all
places) Eritrea, has devoted his fascinating
new book to Portugal’s days of anguish.
(One mass grave of more than 3,000 disaster
victims was uncovered only six years
ago.) After the destruction’s full extent
became known abroad, from late November
onwards, diagnoses abounded. Certain
English Protestant controversialists
had a simple explanation: they regarded
the earthquake as divine punishment on
Catholics for being Catholics. Meanwhile,
Catholics regarded the earthquake
as divine punishment on themselves for
not being devout enough. Spaniards, traditionally
hostile to their western neighbors—who from 1580 to 1640 had also
been their western subjects—condemned
them as pocos y locos: “few and mad.”
Paice’s descriptions show that when every
allowance has been made for foreign critics’
biases, eighteenth-century Catholicism
in Lisbon must be called dire. It
lacked nothing in numbers (“one in six of
Lisbon’s adult population was a religioso of
some description”), but much in dignity:
the locals “talked, laughed, flirted and
even ate and drank in church.” Too often
the nation’s upper clergy took their moral
tone from King João V (r. 1706–50) who
unleashed most of his carnal appetite on
nuns, and who allegedly took his confessor
with him to his conventual assignations,
thereby ensuring the successive dichotomous
ecstacies of sin and penitence. One
patriarch amassed an encyclopedic collection
of “pornography and snuff-boxes
with pictures of naked women on them”;
another “kept a gambling house”; a third
“was imprisoned after trying to run away
with an Irish prostitute.” (Note to lachrymose
American Catholic bloggers: the
American clerical sex abuse scandal was not
the defining world-historical event of the
last two millennia.)

John Wesley, who rushed into print a
pamphlet on the topic, announced that the
earthquake signified God meting out justice
not “to the small vulgar, but the great,
to the learned, rich, and honorable heathens,
commonly called Christians.” This
ingenious interpretation failed to explain
how Lisbon’s own “small vulgar” had
been killed in such huge numbers, while
wealthy and libidinous clerics lived to fornicate
another day. Dr. Johnson, who by
temperament needed no reminding as to
his Creator’s wrath, refused for six months
to believe that the earthquake had ever
occurred. By such disbelief alone could
he hang onto his sanity. Others found the
earthquake all too credible, all too confronting,
and all too destructive of their
religious faith. In 1955 historian Charles
Boxer likened the earthquake’s international
impact to “that which the explosion
of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima has had
on the world recently.” Voltaire—flushed
with that superhuman ethical authority
which he derived from making his niece
into his concubine—became the bestknown
among the earthquake’s intellectual
casualties. He turned the catastrophe
into the setting for Candide (which went
through at least seventeen editions in 1759
alone), as well as into the basis for his earlier,
180-line Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne.
More concise was Goethe’s verdict:
“the Demon of fear had never so speedily
and powerfully diffused his terror over the
earth.”

Historical analogies are normally misleading
when not actively pernicious.
(How many mothers’ sons have been sent
to their Serbian and Iraqi graves by Tony
Blair’s fear of resembling Neville Chamberlain?)
Still, when confronted with Lisbon’s
collapse, the reader’s thoughts turn
inevitably to 9/11, and perhaps to the
December 2004 tsunami as well. Looming
over the debris stood Portugal’s de facto
prime minister, the Marqués de Pombal,
who oversaw the cleaning-up process
like a bewigged Rudy Giuliani. To Pombal
is often credited the terse directive:
“Bury the dead and take care of the living.”
Whatever Pombal’s other crimes, he
helped ensure, by his vigorous relief effort,
that no epidemics broke out, that Lisbon
recovered something of its former importance
as a trading center, and that looters
were swiftly hanged. Yet neither Pombal
nor anyone else could expunge from men’s
minds the horrors they had beheld. “The
banker Benjamin Harboyne, for example,
‘became a raving lunatic’ during the quake
and had to be shipped home in chains to
live out his days under the watchful eyes of
a keeper at his home in Yorkshire.” Richard
Wolfall, a British surgeon, reported on
the wreckage:

The shocking sight of the dead bodies,
together with the shrieks and
cries of those, who were half-buried
in the ruins, are only known to those
who were eyewitnesses. It far exceeds
all description, for the fear and consternation
was [sic] so great, that the
most resolute person durst not stay a
moment to remove a few stones off
the friend he loved most, though many
might have been saved by so doing:
but nothing was thought of but selfpreservation;
getting into open spaces,
and in to the middle of streets, was the
most probable security. Such as were
in the upper stories of houses, were
in general more fortunate than those
that attempted to escape by the doors;
for they were buried under the ruins
with the greatest part of the footpassengers:
such as were in equipages
escaped best, though their cattle and
drivers suffered severely; but those lost
in houses and the streets were very
unequal in number to those, that were
buried in the ruins of churches . . . all
the churches in the city were vastly
crowded, and the number of churches
here exceeds that of both London and
Westminster.

For such pusillanimous notions as the
separation of powers, Pombal harbored a
cynical contempt. He enjoyed the advantage
of an utterly compliant sovereign:
João V’s son and successor, José I, in whom
the earthquake inspired a lifelong claustrophobia
and who viewed his royal function
as that of doing anything Pombal wanted.
(Since 1775 José’s bronze equestrian statue
has dominated Lisbon’s chief plaza, giving
his public image a machismo at complete
odds with reality.) So frightened of
further quakes that he spent most of his
remaining years living in a wooden barrack,
José piled honors on Pombal. After
a purported assassination attempt against
the king, Pombal abandoned even the pretense
of subordinate status: he rounded
up members of a leading aristocratic family
and had them judicially murdered,
without trial, but with every refinement
of public torture. A London periodical,
The Gentleman’s Magazine, called Pombal
“a destroying angel, scattering vengeance
through the land.” The “destroying angel”
followed this coup by suppressing the Jesuits,
by systematically weakening Portugal’s
economic dependence on Britain by nurturing
local industries, and by crushing
the nobility in general. When King José
died in 1777, his daughter Maria became
queen and almost immediately carried out
her long-vowed plan to drive the septuagenarian
Pombal from office. He endured
far milder chastisement than he had ever
inflicted on his enemies: nothing more
onerous than house arrest. Five years after
his downfall he died, a sufferer (or was this
just foes’ gossip?) from leprosy and contrite
enough to receive the last sacraments.

Today, while remembrance of Pombal’s
reformist activity in the earthquake’s
aftermath is largely confined to scholars,
the earthquake itself continues to haunt
the national imagination. Curious to learn
from Paice that most local sources for the
disaster comprise, on the admission of
Portuguese historian Gustavo de Matos
Sequeira, little more than “a vast series of
useless documents.” Perhaps they really
are as bad as this dismissal makes them
sound; perhaps the scene was simply too
heartbreaking for Lisbon’s natives to view
clearly. What is undeniable is that Paice has
made of this tale an enthralling narrative,
which surges forward at a cracking pace,
and which cannot fail to inspire renewed
interest in a tragedy too often overlooked
of late by the rest of the world. Now all we
need is the movie version.