Giuseppe Baretti's Shocking 18th Century Portugal Travelogue: Racial Prejudice and Post-Earthquake Lisbon

The Controversial Traveler

Italian writer, critic, translator, and scholar Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789) embarked on a journey to Lisbon on August 31, 1760, accompanied by Edward Southwell, Baron of Clifford. This voyage resulted in two significant books: Lettere Familiari di Giuseppe Baretti A' Suoi Tre Fratelli Tornando da Londra in Italia nel 1760 (vol. I, 1762; vol. II, 1763) and A Journey from London to Genoa Through England, Portugal, Spain and France (London, 1770). Although the English work presents itself as a translation of the first, the differences between Lettere and A Journey are considerable, making them unique.

Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789)

In both texts, rather than providing an objective and detailed guide, Baretti embarks on an emotional journey—a voyage of discovery of personal, cultural, moral, existential, and ethical thoughts. Faced with a world different from his own, strange and extraordinary (in both positive and negative senses), attentive to what he deems worthy of record, Baretti, using the humor he learned from Italian authors of the time, often departs from the conventions of travel literature: he privileges anecdotes, makes criticisms, and reveals interests and ideologies.

The European Fascination with Post-Earthquake Lisbon

Curiosity about Lisbon must have been certainly great. The uniqueness of the 1755 tragedy had been news throughout Europe: such as the detailed account published in London in the magazine The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, by Edward Cave, on November 6, 1755, just five days after the event; not to mention Voltaire's references to the earthquake in Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne (1756) and in Candide (1758). The attraction became even greater when the "world" to be known was a kingdom whose political vicissitudes, such as the attempted assassination of King José I and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, were subjects of reflection in the rest of Europe. Portugal was a kingdom to be examined "under a magnifying glass."

The Lisbon earthquake in 1755, unknown author.

Baretti's Unflattering Portrait of Portugal

Without hiding the philosophical and mental superiority he felt towards the Iberian world, similar to that expressed by much of the English intellectual world of the time, Baretti, without worrying about losing ground in objectivity and authority, constructs an unflattering image of Portugal. He excuses himself with the little time available and the lack of knowledge of the facts, people, and functioning of institutions. If he softens his criticisms of the country in Journey, saying that he lacked knowledge of the language and interaction with the Portuguese aristocracy, probably in step with civilized Europe, in Lettere his humorous verve is so strong that he received strong criticisms from Ambrósio Pereira Freire de Andrade e Castro, Minister plenipotentiary in Austria, displeased with the criticisms of the Portuguese royal family: Baretti finds it too simple, humble, too close to the people, lacking the exemplary distance of other royal houses.

But what makes him sigh with relief when he crosses the border and leaves Portugal is almost everything: a people who probably did not even feel the loss of books in the earthquake, because those were never "fashionable" here; who only have a Camões and an Osório, and not even those are read; who built a palace in Mafra disproportionate to the landscape and with a library full of religious books and nothing scientific; a government that sent away the Jesuits, the only guarantee of education; who has bad inns, many with fleas; a poorly educated and malicious population... A people who did little after the tragedy of 1755. Ignorant, backward, poor, and not very hardworking. He would never return to Portugal. Not because he did not want to, but because the Marquis of Pombal would not forgive his criticisms and would refuse to allow the Italian writer to enter the kingdom.

The Racial Prejudice: "Portugal Is Too Close to Africa"

Perhaps what predisposed him most to dislike Portugal, however, was, in customs and people, the proximity to Africa: "But, regardless of what I believe, don't you think that Portugal is too close to Africa?" (Journey, 1970: 190). A proximity also evoked in the presence of blacks and mulattos throughout Lisbon. Capital of the Portuguese empire, crossroads between continents, the presence of people of different races certainly gave the city an unusual multiethnic atmosphere. Therefore, when he describes Portugal as a country full of blacks, he demonstrates the feeling of strangeness that a racially mixed society provoked in him.

Cais do Sodré in 1785, by Joaquim Marques – MNAA

If, on one hand, Baretti does not approve of slavery, on the other, he opposes miscegenation, considering mulattos as "human monsters." He notes, in Lettere, the large number of blacks, men and women, transported from Africa to Portugal, or born in Portugal of African parents, who "fill this small corner of Europe with a kind of human monsters called mulattos, who are children of a black and a white woman, or of a black woman and a white man." These "monsters, in turn, produce other monsters by uniting with other European men and women." Thus, "few Portuguese families manage to remain purely European, and with the passage of time all will become mixed, that is, in all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, African blood will enter."

In Journey, he is more specific: black and white produce a mulatto; a mulatto with a white produces a mestizo. These can be white or black mestizos and can naturally, without impediments, marry whites, blacks, mulattos, and other mestizos. To such an extent did these mixtures exist and were looked upon with such naturalness that Portugal was depraving the original European race and even destroying it. Therefore, with laughter mixed in, he argues that it would be necessary to increasingly purge the nobility, made of racial crossings, of this nation that considers itself so noble and the most illustrious and worthy of all nations.

Peditório de Nossa Senhora da Atalaia (in Montijo), in Sketches of Portuguese Life, 1826

The Pseudoscientific Context of Racial Theories

The idea that descendants of interracial relations tainted the purity of races was widespread in Europe with the advent of new pseudoscientific orientations based on climatological and racial theories, to the point that, in the 19th century, in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, Arthur de Gobineau developed his thought on the principle of ethnic degeneration of races. For the author, this degeneration arose from the mixture, the fragility, and the inferiority of mixed races and their necessarily mixed nations. If the Portuguese mixed with blacks and indigenous peoples, adopting their customs, this, for the French theorist, occurred because the two races possessed factors of attraction and proximity: the Portuguese race was not so distant from the defects of the indigenous races.

Baretti positions himself ethnocentrically, giving voice to a code of ethical and aesthetic values that guide his vision of the world and others. Reducing Portugal to his personal dimension of civilization, he focuses on eccentricities or reprehensible attitudes, which he reports with more or less humor. But he also gives us the portrait of a kingdom that, in the century of the Enlightenment, showed itself modern in what Baretti finds monstrous: in the construction of an interracial and inclusive society.

[The articles in the Portugal 900 Years series are a weekly collaboration of the Historical Society of the Independence of Portugal. The authors' opinions represent their own positions.]