European Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, 351–358 (2006)  Academia Europaea, Printed in the United Kingdom On how not to be Lisbon if you want to be modern – Dutch reactions to the Lisbon earthquake THEO D’HAEN English Department, Faculty of Arts, K.U. Leuven University, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: theo.dhaen@arts.kuleuven.be Contemporary Dutch reactions to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 mostly followed the general European pattern, explaining the event from a philosophical and theological stance. Still, the one Dutch poet to write extensively on the disaster gave a peculiarly Dutch twist to his interpretation. In essence, he used the Lisbon disaster to vent his views on the Dutch Republic’s position at the middle of the eighteenth century, and to urge it to reclaim its rightful place in the scheme of things of what we in the meantime have come to call modernity. Some two centuries later, a major Dutch modernist poet again fastened upon the Lisbon earthquake to define himself in relation to that same modernity. However, he did so in a sense opposite to that of his eighteenth-century predecessor. On 26 November 1755, in the ’s Graevenhaegse Courant, a newspaper published in The Hague, the general Dutch public was first informed about the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November of the same year. Other channels had worked more rapidly. As was to be expected, the Dutch emissary to Portugal, C.P. Bosc de la Calmette, immediately had sent reports on the earthquake to the authorities in The Hague. But from a personal collection of notes, newspaper clippings, and the like, kept from 1747 to 1758 by Jan de Boer, a clerk at an Amsterdam stock exchange firm, we know that business correspondence relative to the earthquake also reached Amsterdam early, and that it seriously affected the Stock Exchange. After all, Lisbon was among the biggest of European cities at the time, and it was an important trading centre for colonial wares from the East. Amsterdam, even though its real heydays were over, continued to be an important financial centre, and the Netherlands, with their own colonial empire in the East Indies, and the