Giuseppe Baretti five years after the earthquake

The Turin-born writer, critic, translator, and scholar Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789) traveled to Lisbon from Falmouth on August 31, 1760, in the company of Edward Southwell, Baron Clifford, a future Member of Parliament. The journey resulted in two books: *Lettre 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 difference between the * Lettre Familiari* and *A Journey* is considerable, making them unique. This is not a minor issue, because, when considering Baretti's perspective on Portugal, it is necessary to take into account that the two texts, intended for different national audiences, reveal, in the details, the readers and their expectations. A profound connoisseur of English culture and a respected member of intellectual circles of the time, Baretti knew that what is appreciated in Italy is not always appreciated in England.

In both texts, more than an objective and detailed guide, Baretti takes an emotional journey, a voyage of discovery into personal, cultural, moral, existential, and ethical thoughts. Faced with a world different from his own, strange and extraordinary (in a positive or negative sense), attentive to what seems worthy of recording, Baretti, using the humor he had learned from Italian authors of the time, frequently departs from the conventions of travel literature: he favors anecdotes, offers critiques, and reveals interests and ideologies.

The curiosity surrounding Lisbon must have been certainly great. The uniqueness of the 1755 tragedy had been newsworthy throughout Europe: this is the case with the detailed account published in London in Edward Cave's *The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle * on November 6, 1755, just five days after the event; not forgetting 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 explored was a kingdom whose political vicissitudes, such as the attempted assassination of King José I and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, were a subject of reflection in the rest of Europe. Portugal was a kingdom to be examined closely.

Without hiding the philosophical and intellectual superiority he felt in relation to 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 a rather unflattering image of Portugal. He excuses himself with the limited time available and the lack of knowledge of the facts, the people, and the workings of the institutions. While he softens his criticisms of the country in * Journey*, saying that he lacked knowledge of the language and contact with the Portuguese aristocracy, probably at the same pace as civilized Europe, in *Lettres* his humorous verve is so strong that he receives strong criticism from Ambrósio Pereira Freire de Andrade e Castro, Minister Plenipotentiary in Austria, who was unhappy with the criticisms of the Portuguese royal family: Baretti finds them 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 didn't even feel the loss of books in the earthquake, because they were never "fashionable" here; who only have one Camões and one Osório, and even those aren't 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 expelled the Jesuits, the only guarantor of education; who have bad inns, many with fleas; an ill-mannered and malicious population… A people who did little after the tragedy of 1755. Ignorant, backward, poor, and not very hardworking. He will never return to Portugal. Not because he doesn't want to, but because the Marquis of Pombal will not forgive his criticisms and will refuse to allow the Italian writer into the kingdom.

Perhaps what least predisposed him to dislike Portugal, however, was its proximity to Africa in terms of customs and people: “But, regardless of what I believe, don’t you think Portugal is very close to Africa?” ( Journey, 1970: 190). A proximity also evoked by the presence of black and mulatto people throughout Lisbon. Capital of the Portuguese empire, crossroads between continents, the presence of people of different races certainly gave the city an unusual multi-ethnic atmosphere. Therefore, when he describes Portugal as a country full of black people, he demonstrates the feeling of strangeness that a racially mixed society provoked in him.

While Baretti disapproves of slavery, he opposes miscegenation, considering mulattos as "human monsters." In his Lettere , he recounts the large number of black men and women transported from Africa to Portugal, or born in Portugal to African parents, who "fill this small corner of Europe with a kind of human monster called mulattos, who are the children of a black man 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 over time all will become mixed-race, that is, African blood will enter all of them to a greater or lesser degree."

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

The idea that descendants of interracial relationships 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 the ethnic degeneration of races. For the author, this degeneration arose from the mixture, fragility, and inferiority of mixed races and their necessarily mixed nations. If the Portuguese intermingled with blacks and indigenous people, 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 far removed 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 of others. Reducing Portugal to his personal dimension of civilization, he focuses on eccentricities or reprehensible attitudes, which he recounts with varying degrees of humor. But he also gives us a portrait of a kingdom that, in the Age of Enlightenment, appeared 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 opinions of the authors represent their own positions.]