Terror

The French really were amateurs when compared to Portugal and Pombal…

In this prison there are nineteen cells: two are almost totally dark, and among the others there are two that have the reputation of being the worst, by their small size, and because they are close to a pipe where filth pours out.

-          Marquês de Alorna, the prisons of Junqueira

This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason, by Mark Molesky

If only life returned to normal in Lisbon within a few months of the earthquake.  No such luck.  Eight months later – in the summer of 1756 – tremors continued, along with riots, murders, and robberies.  Gangs would start fires in the tent cities in order to rob from the residents that would flee the flames.

Pombal’s powers would increase, along with his list of enemies.  His tyrannies would also increase, yet order was nowhere to be found.  A conspiracy was formed to remove and replace him.  The conspiracy was discovered, and with royal support Pombal moved quickly against even the most highly placed conspirators.  Some would find a new home in Junqueira; others were banished from the city.  These were the lucky ones.

Pombal reserved a special hatred for the Jesuits – and it was not due solely to the preaching of Malagrida and others who were blaming the earthquake on Lisbon’s sins.  In the New World, the Jesuits had built a power base – converting the natives in numbers beyond imagination.  The natives would now labor for the Jesuits – where 200 Jesuits would control a workforce of 140,000.

Spanish and Portuguese colonists complained that the Jesuits controlled too much of the native workforce.  The colonists would raid villages in order to capture workers – call them slave-hunters.  The Jesuits felt they had no choice but to arm the natives.  Now the Jesuits were also in charge of vast armies, often successful in battle.

Portugal and Spain sent armies to crush the Jesuits.  In their place, Pombal created government enforced monopolies.  In addition to the Jesuits, smaller businessmen were out and state control increased.

Pombal acted in a similar manner in Portugal – for example, identifying certain areas of the Douro as the only ones authorized to sell port wines to the British.  Of course, the choice of these areas concentrated wealth in the hands of those favored by the state – to include vineyards owned by Pombal.  Pombal would write in 1756 that he took such actions because “I know their interests better than they do themselves, and the interests of the whole kingdom.”

The smaller vineyard owners would riot; Pombal’s retribution was swift and severe.  Of 478 accused, 442 were convicted.  Fourteen were hanged with their limbs thereafter hung on pikes and displayed for the public.  Fifty-nine were exiled to India and Africa; others were imprisoned or delivered to the galleys.  Most had their property seized to the benefit of the state.  Porto was thereafter placed under martial law.  Pombal’s cousin was placed in charge, staying in power as military governor of northern Portugal for over 20 years.

An assassination attempt, supposedly against the king, was used as pretext for countless arrests – including some of the most powerful nobility of the kingdom.  All were interrogated; many were tortured.  The trial was quick, the defense had twenty-four hours to prepare.  The accused were executed the next day – including many members of the noble family who once rejected Pombal as inadequate for one of their daughters.

A platform was erected; ten-thousand were in the audience.  The punishment for attempted regicide was always brutal, but rarely public when the “guilty” were members of the nobility.  Pombal would change this.  One by one, the prisoners were brought out: some beheaded, some strangled with limbs broken thereafter, some had limbs broken while alive.  Finally, Antonio Alvares Ferreira was brought out to be burned alive.  He was burned, along with the pile of corpses and limbs of those who were executed before him.

The French Reign of Terror lasted eleven months; Pombal’s lasted eighteen years – from 1759 to 1777.  The prisons were bursting, with many who were never even charged, let alone tried and convicted.  Some remained in their cells for years.

Ordinary people feared making even private comments that might be construed as critical of Pombal.  The despotism of the enlightened first minister had started to take on features of a police state.

His war with the Jesuits continued as well: stripped of positions, removed from universities and schools.  Pombal’s attacks were not limited to Portugal – he sent books and pamphlets throughout Europe.  In 1764, the Jesuits were expelled from France and Spain; in 1773, they were suppressed by Pope Clement XIV.

Pombal, described as a “practicing Catholic,” nevertheless never deferred to the authority of Rome.  It was the state’s right to remove any bishop or cleric from office.  In 1760 he even removed the papal nuncio and also orchestrated a formal break with Rome – a break that lasted for ten years until the pope gave in to his every demand. 

Pombal ended slavery in Portugal – not for humanitarian reasons, but so they could return to Brazil to work in the fields and mines.  Slavery was not abolished in Brazil for another century.  He founded state schools throughout the empire – replacing the Jesuit schools that were by then disbanded.

Portugal’s economy would languish for years after the earthquake.  Understandable on the one hand, yet compounded by the establishment of state-enforced monopolies, increases in regulation, taxes and tariffs.

Dom José died in 1777, and with him went Pombal’s power. 

Upon learning the news, jubilant priests ran door to door announcing the end to the tyranny, and ballads deprecating Pombal filled the air.

The king’s daughter, Maria I, opened the prisons.  Eight-hundred came out, some who hadn’t been seen for twenty years.  Perhaps two-thousand died in their cells.

Many were calling for Pombal’s head.  He tendered his resignation and fled with his family into exile.  While it would have been politically expedient for the queen to condemn Pombal, she knew that by doing so she would also be condemning her father – every major edict had been signed by the king, and in any case Pombal served at the king’s pleasure.

Pombal lived six more years, dying a slow and painful death in poor health.

Conclusion

Voltaire would only grow more pessimistic.  “The universe is ‘completely mad,’ Voltaire wrote.”  Yet optimism did not immediately die out in Europe nor in Enlightened philosophy, though as the century wore on this optimism would wane.

To assert, as some have, that the Lisbon disaster represents an abrupt break or transformation in European thought – or that it signaled the onset of modernity – would be to distort the historical record.

Certainly.  History rarely offers abrupt breaks, and certainly not in an era when communication was hindered and Christianity – albeit post-Reformation Christianity – still was infused into the culture of the continent. 

Yet the earthquake raised many questions for the theologians.  As man applied reason to these questions, Europe would be changed.  No single event can be identified for a transformation from what we call pre-modernity to modernity, but the Lisbon earthquake certainly belongs in the discussion.

The Most Significant Event of the European Enlightenment

This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason, by Mark Molesky

Molesky spends time on the pre-earthquake history of Portugal and significant detail on the disasters that came with the earthquake.  I offered an overview of this previously, so will only touch on a couple of additional points now: Portugal was as Catholic as Catholic could be – even after the Reformation; Portugal also had episodes of being one of the most widespread and wealthiest empires in the world.

My focus here is on the aftershocks – not physical, but philosophic and religious. 

God, said to be omniscient and merciful, showed himself to be a very poor sort of father.  So writes Bahngrell Brown when considering the reaction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was but six years old at the time of the quake.

Everywhere there was significant disagreement and debate on the disaster – within five years, hundreds of books, articles, etc., were published, all attempting to answer the question: who, or what, was responsible?  Was it God or was it nature?  Even the question reflected change.

The ensuing debate was arguably the most significant of the European Enlightenment.

Perhaps the fundamental question:

…how could a just and all-powerful God have sanctioned the deaths of so many innocent people?

Prior to this earthquake, optimism was blossoming everywhere in the decades of peace that followed the wars of religion – which were actually wars of state-creation.  Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz argued in 1710 that an “infinitely benevolent Deity had created the universe with the greatest possible excess of good over evil.”  This view would begin to change.

Voltaire would write of the disaster.  In Switzerland and in exile, away from Louis XV and the guards of the Bastille, he was living by this time a somewhat sedentary (at least by his former standards) life.  By this time in Europe’s evolution, dogma and superstition were well replaced by science and reason – long a central tenet of Voltaire’s work.

The news hit Voltaire like a thunderbolt.  “Nature is very cruel. …What a wretched gamble is the game of human life!”

Science and reason still left room for God, but only a god as described by Leibniz: “infinitely benevolent,” one that created a “universe with the greatest possible excess of good over evil.”  Yes, evil existed, but it was insignificant when compared to the “flawless totality of his handiwork.” 

A world that was believed to be so ordered – a perfect creation of God – now seemed capricious and cruel.  The earthquake called into question “this happy progress toward Eden.”  What would this mean about “God”?

“Would the entire universe have been worse without this hellish abyss, without swallowing up Lisbon?  Could not [God] plunge us into this wretched world without placing flaming volcanoes beneath our feet?”

Voltaire would offer a poem, one of despair.  His closing lines:

Will ye reply “You do but illustrate

The iron laws that chain the will of God?”

Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh

“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death?”

Rousseau would react to Voltaire’s characterization of a world overflowing with misery and suffering: “You do not want us, Monsieur, to read your poem as denying Providence.”  Rousseau would argue that much of the world’s unhappiness is caused by man.  He even went as far to say that some who were crushed were better off dead!

Kant would work to reconcile the earthquake with Providence, seeing it a result of the same subterranean fires that give us hot springs and steam baths.  The horrors of Lisbon could have been averted had the Portuguese properly prepared for such an event.

Over time, the earthquake would force Kant to alter his thinking.  Hitherto, his works were filled with speculative reference to the Divine.  After Lisbon, he began to embrace a more empirical approach to knowledge and the universe.

Man must not blame providence; he must recognize that every single event was – in every single respect – produced by himself.

The theories behind the causes of earthquakes were equally challenged – as noted by Kant to include subterranean fires.  Others believed there were exploding deposits of subterranean sulfur or electricity connected by underground caverns. 

Yet most Spanish scholars dismissed the popular notion that earthquakes were some form of divine punishment.  Some of the more accurate theories of the time were offered by scholars within the Church.

Ultimately, the earthquake brought to the fore both how far ideas of the Enlightenment had penetrated society and how deep religious conviction about God’s role in daily life still held sway. 

Conclusion

God and God’s role in the world; random chance and capricious events.  What did the earthquake signify?  What did it destroy from the philosophic and Christian past?  What would replace these?

It was certainly a confused and confusing time for the intellectuals and elite of Europe, perhaps best summarized by Edmond-Jean Barbier:

Embarrassing for the professors of physics

And humiliating for the theologians.

This embarrassment and humiliation still had to be worked out.  This process would begin in the reign of terror.  Not the one that you are thinking of.

You Complete Me

On All Saints Day 1755, tremors from an earthquake measuring approximately 9.0 or higher on the moment magnitude scale swept furiously toward Lisbon…

This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason, by Mark Molesky

Almost instantly, much of the city was in ruins; within 30 minutes, a tsunami barreled up the Tagus River and carried thousands of bodies out to sea – dead and alive; shortly thereafter a fire engulfed whatever would burn.  Lisbon, one of Europe’s wealthiest cities, was virtually no more.

The disaster is significant on its own, but my interest is in the impact on the culture and religion.  Portugal was as Catholic a kingdom that one could find; the earthquake did not just shake physical foundations.

Six years after the earthquake, in September 1761, Father Gabriel Malagrida was headed toward execution.  The seventy-two-year-old Jesuit priest was a former favorite of the king.  This would not save him on this day.  Eleven years before, he entered Lisbon in triumph – hailed as a “living saint”; this was before the earthquake.

The earthquake was the largest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, and the largest to strike Europe.  Equivalent to 32,000 Hiroshima bombs, three times the power of Krakatoa, and a thousand times more powerful than the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010.

It arrived at 9:45 AM, during morning mass with the churches full of worshipers on All Saints Day.  Thousands were buried in place – in church, at home, on the streets.  Survivors fled to the riverbank, only to be swept out to sea by the tsunami.  The worst was still to come – an uncontrollable and unquenchable fire, burning out of control for weeks.

“I believe,” wrote one dazed survivor, that “so compleat a Destruction has hardly befallen any Place on Earth since the Overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Six years later – as Malagrida was being led to his end, the city still remained in ruins.  The rebuilding project had barely begun.  Thieves and dogs ruled the city.  The survivors of this pitiable scene strained to see Malagrida taking his last steps.  This, a result of the Portuguese Inquisition, proving that Malagrida was a heretic.

The royal family was absent.  In their stead was Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal, 1st Count of Oeiras.  Let’s call him Pombal to make everyone’s lives easier.  He had been the earthquake’s greatest beneficiary, taking action when no one else would or could act, when the king remained in his prolonged daze.  At the time of the earthquake, he was secretary of state for foreign affairs.  Shortly after, he would become virtually Portugal’s dictator. 

Several months after the earthquake, a sermon by Malagrida was published:

“Know, oh Lisbon,” he thundered, “that the destroyers of so many houses and palaces, the devastators of so many churches and monasteries, the killer of so many people…are not comets, stars, vapors, exhalations, phenomena, accidents, or natural causes – but only our intolerable sins.”

He offered: The Good Lord had decided to smash Lisbon to the ground.  It was not the message that Pombal wanted delivered – he saw the earthquake as a random occurrence – or at least this is how he wanted it explained.

Pombal implored the cardinal patriarch to forbid priests from delivering sermons that “increased the anxiety of the people” and caused them to cease working and “flee to deserted places.”

But Malagrida would not be silenced.  As he sent his 31-page pamphlet to many of the most prominent figures in the kingdom – including Pombal – his actions would not go unnoticed.  He was implicated (and almost certainly framed, according to Molesky) in an attempt by the Duke of Aveiro and members of the Távora family to assassinate José I, the king.

Perhaps an important note: before Pombal came to power – before, even, he came into any notoriety at all – he naively attempted to woo a daughter of the noble and wealthy Távora family.  He was unceremoniously sent on his way.  This might suggest something about the motivation for Pombal behind the charge.

Malagrida languished in prison for two years, until his trial and sentence.  The verdict and sentence were assured, as Pombal appointed his brother as Inquisitor General.  This was just of a type for Pombal, as he went after the two institutions that stood in between him and absolute power: The Church and the nobility.

For in Pombal’s newly conceived absolutist state, the twin demons of modernity – political violence and an abiding contempt for tradition – would be fully realized.

Malagrida – the once-beloved holy man – stood silently for two hours while the charges were read against him. 

… “a monster of the greatest iniquity,” who had acted as if he were a “saint” and a “true prophet.” …he had faked “miracles, revelations, visions, locutions, and other favores celestiaes” (heavenly favors) …

This in addition to admitting to having conversed regularly with many saints.  This ability once brought him reverence.  Now it brought him a garrote.  No blood – as a gesture of respect. 

Members of the Távora family were not so fortunate.  Two years before, as Pombal’s assault on the aristocracy intensified, several male and female members of the family…

…had been ritually torn apart in a publicly staged bloodbath of such concentrated cruelty that the future French revolutionary executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, might have recoiled in horror.

Once dead, Malagrida’s corpse was covered in wood and set ablaze; the ashes were thrown into the Tagus.  Nothing left to be gathered up by his admirers – no memory of him or his remains.

Conclusion

Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau would all weigh in the Great Lisbon Earthquake Debate: Europe was in between believing God was in control and science had conquered all. 

The earthquake would prove to be one of the defining events of the Enlightenment.