Some 90,000 people died in Lisbon-more than one third of its population.The earthquake also pounded Europe's political and cultural thinking. Lisbon lessened either God's beneficence or his power. The quake also lessened their estimation of human reason and a reasonable world. Voltaire published a Poem on the Lisbon Disaster:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Voltaire reveals, from those opening lines, the despair of a thinker who's inspired by the intellectual consequences of this event. Voltaire also inserted the earthquake into Candide's absurdly catastrophic life. From a ship in Lisbon harbor, Candide watched helplessly as the good drown and the wicked survive. His friend Martin concludes that if the world has any purpose at all, it is to drive us mad.
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