On 1 November 1755, an earthquake shook the city of Lisbon. The news of the disaster quickly reached the French philosophes and sparked one of the most famous philosophical and theological controversies of French intellectual history. As tens of thousands of people had perished in the disaster, philosophers frantically debated on the role of Providence in human affairs. Voltaire, who responded to the disaster most swiftly, wrote in his Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne:

Voltaire further drives his point and clarifies what is philosophically unacceptable in the event: ‘which crime, which mistake have these children committed, crushed on their mother's breast in their own blood? Was Lisbon, which is no more, more corrupt than London or Paris full of delights? What? Lisbon is destroyed and we dance in Paris?’

Let me make a few preliminary observations. To the best of my knowledge, Voltaire's intervention marks the first time that a philosopher directly addresses his community of fellow philosophers and the general public about a contemporary but distant disaster, and the first time that a philosopher does this by questioning the role of Providence in human affairs. Voltaire's bold conceptual move consists in refusing to view suffering either as the punishment for a hidden sin or as the incomprehensible but just decree of an unfathomable God (Neiman, 2002; Baczko 1997). Voltaire claims that suffering ought to be submitted to the realm of human intelligibility and reason and that as such we can and ought to apply ordinary criteria of justice to suffering, wherever it takes place. In so doing, Voltaire breaks not only with traditional religious theodicy, but also with the eighteenth-century literary cult of suffering which had made tears synonymous with virtue and the spectacle of heroines’ misery into a sweet sentiment supposed to elicit gentle compassion (see Boltanski 1999).