Response to the Disaster
The extensive number of renderings of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake found throughout Europe demonstrates the traumatic effect the disaster had on the continent. Depictions of the Lisbon earthquake were created, copied, and widely distributed and discussed throughout all of southern, western and central Europe. Whether created by the new desire to investigate, record, and understand the earthquake in natural rather than strictly metaphysical terms, or created by the more sensational desire to report on human calamity, these depictions indicate that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 represents a water-shed event in European history.
One-third of the city was totally destroyed by the quake and flood. Estimates of casualties ranged from 10,000 to 40,000 - at the time, the latter estimate was widely believed, though the true figure was probably closer to 15,000. The royal family, who were at Belem, outside of the city, escaped what would have been certain death in their collapsed palace in Lisbon. The bewildered and frightened king placed full authority in the hands of his only minister who showed any capacity to deal with the catastrophe - Pombal.
The scope of the destruction was colossal. The Royal Opera House, completed only a month before, was in ruins. Of Lisbon's forty parish churches, thirty-five had collapsed, many onto parishioners who had been at mass when the earthquake struck, crushing them to death within the ruins. Only 3,000 of Lisbon's 20,000 houses were inhabitable. The palace of the Inquisition on the Rossio had crumbled and many townhouses and palaces of the aristocracy were destroyed. At one mansion alone 200 paintings were lost, including a Titian and Rubens and a library of 18,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts; 70,000 books in the king's library perished. It was the earthquake that propelled Pombal to virtual absolute power, which he was to retain for another twenty-two years until the king's death in 1777. He took quick, effective, and ruthless action to stabilize the situation. Looters were unceremoniously hanged, bodies of the earthquake victims were quickly gathered and with the permission of the Lisbon patriarch, taken out to sea, weighted and thrown into the ocean. Rents, food prices, and the cost of building materials were fixed at pre-earthquakc levels. No temporary rebuilding was permitted until the land was cleared and plans for new construction drawn up.
Military engineers and surveyors, headed by General Manucl de Maia (1673-1768), the 80-year-old chief engineer, Colonel Carlos Mardel (1695-1763), and Captain Eugenio dos Santos (1711-1760), were charged with making inventories of property rights and claims, and implementing the myriad of practical decisions to assure that sanitary and leveling operations were carried out safely. They were also charged with drawing up plans for the new city.
It was these practical-minded engineer officers who, under the closest scrutiny from Pombal, developed the economical Pombal-type architecture and grid of streets and the great waterfront square which make Lisbon to this day a classic example of eighteenth-century town planning. The waterfront area and the zone back from the river to the Rossio square were leveled and the grading of the steep western slopes reduced. The streets were fixed at 60 feet in width (50 for the roadway and 10 for the sidewalk), the street crossings were set at right angles, and the cross streets were 40 feet in width. To speed up the reconstruction and, simultaneously, encourage national enterprises, an innovative effort at pre-fabrication was promoted; ironwork, wood joints, tiles, ceramics, for instance, were all standardized, as was die overall design of the facades for the new buildings. The ingenious wooden gaiola
The lessons gained from the reconstruction of Lisbon were to be applied by Pombal elsewhere, during the planning of the new buildings at the University of Coimbra in the 17705, for instance, and in the construction of an entirely new town, Vila Real de Santo Antonio, situated in the Algarve on the frontier with Spain, and intended to be a focal point for an effort to recover Portuguese control of the Algarve fisheries. In Oporto extensive urban reconstruction and new buildings in neoclassical style were undertaken by Pombal's energetic cousin, Joao Alrnada e Melo, installed by the all-powerful minister as military governor, president of the municipal senate, and head of public works, much as Pombal had installed his brother Paulo de Carvalho as president of the municipal council and director of public works in Lisbon.
The idea to set a great square on the waterfront as the central focal point of the Lisbon scheme came from Eugenio dos Santos. It was also highly significant that the new square, placed on the old Royal plaza, was to he called, as it remains, the Praca do Comercio - the place of commerce. The new Lisbon was thus intended to be a preeminently mercantile and administrative center. As the rest of Europe debated the meaning of the earthquake for the philosophy of optimism, engaging Voltaire, Goethe, Rousseau and John Wesley, among others, the reaction in Portugal was more prosaic. Pombal's architectural and city planning was intended to celebrate national economic independence and a modern, well-regulated and utilitarian state. As such, they epitomized what Pombal hoped to achieve for Portugal at large.
Even Pombal's most bitter enemies agreed that the public squares of the new Lisbon were "betissimas," as the Jesuit Padre Ansehno Eckart observed on seeing them after being released from prison in 1777. Many critics, however, remained more interested in the disaster than they did in Pombal's remarkable reconstruction of the city. About the new Lisbon, they were largely ignorant; so that the image of Portugal remained fixed, as with Voltaire, as a land of unreasonable catastrophe mired in irrational superstition. Ironically, the article on the new Lisbon commissioned for the 1781 edition of the Encyclopedic methodique arrived too late in Paris for inclusion, and the volume was published without it." So it was Voltaire's Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne, and above all, Voltaire's Candide that set the tone: "The Portuguese pundits could not think of any better way of preventing total ruin than to treat the people to a splendid auto-da-fe." This was, in fact, precisely the opposite of what Pombal believed and practiced in the earthquake's aftermath.
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