Politics of Natural Disasters

Introduction

Natural disasters, while acts of nature, often unmask the failures of human governance. Earthquakes’ impact is rarely equal. The scale of devastation, the swiftness of response, and the fate of survivors frequently depend on political structures, urban planning, and the presence or absence of accountability.

Two of the most devastating earthquakes in European history, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Messina earthquake of 1783, were not only geological events, but political ruptures. They shook the Enlightenment’s moral foundations and invited fierce literary critiques of power and responsibility.

Through the sharp quill of Voltaire and the discerning gaze of Goethe, these catastrophes became symbols of state neglect and philosophical crisis.

The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

On November 1, 1755, a magnitude 8.5 earthquake struck Lisbon. It was followed by a tsunami and raging fires that together killed an estimated 60,000 people. That the catastrophe occurred on All Saints’ Day, when churches were full, was seen by many as a theological puzzle, but it was also a governance disaster.

Voltaire, one of the most influential voices of the Enlightenment, responded with moral outrage. In his “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne”, and later in Candide, he rejected the optimism of Leibnizian philosophy, but he also launched a veiled indictment against those in power. He questioned the rationalist and theological justifications of suffering, suggesting that the true scandal lay in the world humanity had created: a city ill-prepared for disaster, a state unable to protect or rebuild without theological posturing.

“What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived / That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother's breast?” (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster)

Voltaire wasn’t just lamenting divine indifference—he was targeting human complacency and political inaction. The absence of earthquake-resistant infrastructure, the concentration of wealth in religious buildings that collapsed en masse, and the failure of the monarchy to foresee or mitigate such a risk all pointed toward a deficit in political responsibility.

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19404680-po-me-sur-le-d-sastre-de-lisbonne 

Ironically, it was the Marquis of Pombal, the King’s minister, who used the disaster to centralize power. While he orchestrated impressive rebuilding efforts—including modern city planning and seismic-resistant architecture—he also used the event to suppress dissent and intensify royal authority. The earthquake, then, became not just a tragedy but a pretext for authoritarian modernization, a theme that echoes eerily into the 20th and 21st centuries.

While Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne remains a searing indictment of political and theological complacency in the face of catastrophe, it is important to remember that his moral voice was far from consistent. Voltaire was a fierce critic of the monarchy and religious dogma, but he also held and propagated deeply problematic views, including racist and antisemitic attitudes. In his Essai sur les mœurs, he described Jews in harshly stereotyped and derogatory terms, contributing to the long European tradition of antisemitic intellectual discourse.

Moreover, despite occasionally criticizing the brutality of slavery, Voltaire at times defended colonial economic systems and minimized the suffering of colonized peoples, revealing a Eurocentric mindset that aligned him with the very structures of oppression he claimed to resist. Thus, while Voltaire remains an essential figure in the Enlightenment's critique of power, his legacy also illustrates the limits and contradictions of Enlightenment universalism, a vision of reason and progress too often defined in exclusionary and hierarchical terms.

The 1783 Messina Earthquake

Almost three decades later, a series of powerful earthquakes struck Calabria and Messina, in the Kingdom of Naples, between February and March 1783. Around 50,000 people perished, entire villages disappeared, and landslides transformed the geography.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, traveling through Italy during this period, reflected on the disaster in his Italian Journey (Italienische Reise). Unlike Voltaire, Goethe was not directly responding in satirical verse, but his observations were laden with critique, not just of nature’s power, but of human institutions’ helplessness.

“Here, where nature shows her mightiest strength, man appears weakest.”

What Goethe encountered was a state paralyzed by incompetence, relief efforts hampered by bureaucracy, and a ruling class more interested in protecting privilege than lives. Messina’s devastation revealed the structural fragility of the Bourbon monarchy, a system that had neglected regional development and public safety. Goethe’s writings capture not only the sublime terror of nature, but the moral obscenity of political indifference.

Source: https://www.reclam.de/produktdetail/italienische-reise-9783150206096 

The Bourbon response was fragmented and slow, reflecting the broader decay of southern Italian governance. Relief came late, reconstruction was marred by corruption, and whole communities were simply abandoned. Goethe’s scientific mind, deeply attuned to geology and human psychology alike, interpreted the earthquake not merely as a natural phenomenon but as a symptom of a mismanaged state.

The Political Anatomy of Disaster

Both the Lisbon and Messina earthquakes force us to ask: Who is responsible when nature strikes? While the initial shock may come from below, the scale of devastation often originates from above, from rulers who fail to build safely, plan adequately, or respond humanely.

In Lisbon, the monarchy hid behind divine providence and philosophical fatalism, while Voltaire pierced the veil with his satire. In Messina, the Bourbon regime’s decay was made visible in every collapsed building and every untended corpse. Goethe, without pamphlets or polemics, conveyed a similar message: disaster reveals the truth of politics.

These catastrophes offer timeless lessons. Today’s climate emergencies, pandemics, and humanitarian crises echo with the same question: where does nature end, and negligence begin?

Neglect Repeats Itself

Modern history is replete with tragic echoes of Lisbon and Messina. The question of political responsibility in the face of natural disasters has only grown more urgent.

Haiti, 2010: A magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince and killed over 200,000 people. Years of political instability, corrupt institutions, and a lack of basic infrastructure created conditions where even a moderate quake became apocalyptic. International aid poured in, but poor coordination, misuse of funds, and governmental weakness led to a deeply flawed reconstruction process.

Turkey, 1999 and 2023: In the 1999 İzmit earthquake, over 17,000 people died. Investigations revealed that many buildings had collapsed due to lax enforcement of safety codes and rampant construction corruption. Another massive earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria in 2023. Despite two decades of warnings, similar patterns re-emerged: fragile infrastructure, insufficient preparation, and delayed emergency responses. Just as Voltaire condemned theological excuses, modern critics challenged the framing of the disaster as merely “fate,” calling instead for structural reform and political accountability.

Fukushima, 2011: Following a massive earthquake and tsunami, the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was not just a technological failure but a regulatory one. Government-industry collusion, poor disaster planning, and delayed evacuation orders exposed a modern, high-tech society to risks rooted in governance shortcomings. Like Pombal’s centralized response to Lisbon, the Japanese government tightened control in the wake of the disaster, but was also widely criticized for withholding information and downplaying dangers.

In all these cases, natural triggers collided with political inertia, corruption, and denial. The result: preventable deaths, prolonged suffering, and a lingering distrust of institutions.

From Enlightenment to Accountability

Voltaire and Goethe were not policymakers, but they were moral cartographers. Through literature, they mapped the ethical fault lines exposed by disaster. Their voices, centuries apart in tone and method, converge on a shared insight: that the suffering of populations in natural disasters cannot be explained by theology or fate alone. Behind collapsed cathedrals and shattered cities lie the crumbling pillars of “unjust governance.”

In our own age of intensifying environmental crises, their warnings resound. Disasters may be natural, but their death tolls, their aftermaths, and their political uses are profoundly human.

The question is not what shook the ground, but who failed to stand above it.