Major Historic Earthquakes and Their Impact

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, struck on the morning of All Saints' Day, November 1, 1755, is estimated at magnitude 8.5 to 9.0 and was followed by a tsunami and citywide fires that together killed an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 people in Lisbon alone, with shaking felt as far away as North Africa and Scandinavia. The disaster shook European intellectual life as profoundly as it shook the ground: Voltaire attacked providential optimism in his 1759 novella Candide, largely in response to Lisbon, while Immanuel Kant published three scientific essays on the earthquake's causes in 1756, work now regarded as an early contribution to the modern science of seismology.