# Voltaire publishes the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne

Date: 1756

## The fact

In 1756, after the 1 November 1755 Lisbon earthquake, [Voltaire](/people/voltaire) published a poem against providential theodicy. It is not a rebuilding statute.

## Context

Attacking ‘all is well’ after a mass-death disaster is a public-health-adjacent honesty path of medium confidence: it can unstick fatalism. It does not staff a hospital.

Voltaire is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official archive/museum/agency pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Gallica — Voltaire printed works (https://gallica.bnf.fr/; Bibliothèque nationale de France).

## Significance

A poem is not a seismic code.

A poem is not a seismic code.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is infectious-disease-transmission. The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here. Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is infectious-disease-transmission. The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Voltaire: https://factrail.ai/people/voltaire

## Drivers

- Infectious-Disease Transmission: https://factrail.ai/drivers/infectious-disease-transmission

## Sources

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/
- https://gallica.bnf.fr/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/vo-lisbon-poem-1756