To this appalling spectacle of smoking ashes with, His first response was the impassioned “ Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” of 1755:Īs the dying voices call out, will you dare respond This combination of senseless death and even more senseless human responses outraged Voltaire. Pyres were erected in the streets to burn heretics, as scapegoats for the disaster. Catholics proposed, with equal implausibility, the especial sinfulness of the Lisbonites as the disaster’s cause. Protestants saw in Lisbon’s destruction divine judgement on Catholicism.
Within minutes, tens of thousands were dead. In 1755, meanwhile, on November 1, a huge earthquake had struck the Portugese capital, Lisbon, followed by a tsunami. Politically, he had been forced from exile to exile for his criticism of monastic and clerical privileges in France and his Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations (1756), which treated Christianity as just one world religion, rather than the final revealed truth.
Personally, his great love, Émilie du Châtelet had died in 1749.
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