THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 15

lava.” 5 Meanwhile, half a world away, in the Louisiana Territory, an old Mississippi River
flatboatman was heard to blame the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes, the worst in Amer-
ican history, on “old Vesuvius himself.” 6 The power of Vesuvius, as cultural icon, was truly
hemispheric.
Back in England, entertainment entrepreneurs offered a variety of volcanic productions for
those unable to afford a sojourn to Italy. In the popular pleasure gardens of London sideshow
engineers repackaged their pyrotechnic displays as volcanic paroxysm, treating patrons to
nightly effusions of smoke, cacophonic rumbles, and fiery lights jetting from giant plaster Ve-
suvian cones. “The Eruption of Vesuvius Vomiting Forth Torrents of Fire!” promised a typical
newspaper advertisement. Surrey Gardens, which boasted its own lake, could re-create the
entire Bay of Naples in its Vesuvius show. The fireworks' reflections in the water enhanced
the wow-factor of the spectacle, putting the gardens' managers one step ahead of the compet-
ition. 7
Figure 2.1. J.M.W. Turner, Mt. Vesuvius in Eruption (1812). Turner had never visited the Bay of Naples
when he painted this dramatic rendering of Vesuvius. The image thus represents less a physical landscape
than a product of Romantic popular culture—an imagined pastiche of verbal descriptions, other paintings,
and sideshow volcanic spectacles in London. (Yale Center for British Art.)
With the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, a new layer of symbolism became
adhered to volcanic spectacle. 8 On October 17, 1793, at the height of Robespierre's Reign
of Terror, Queen Marie Antoinette faced the guillotine in front of a heaving Jacobin mob in
the newly christened Place de la Révolution in Paris. The following day, the nearby Theatre
de la République premiered a play titled Le jugement dernier des rois ( Day of Judgement for
the Kings ), authored by hard-core revolutionary journalist Sylvain Maréchal. In the play, a
wretched assembly of deposed European monarchs, together with the pope, is deposited on
a tropical island under the loom of a belching volcano. After some valedictory abuse from
their Jacobin captors, they are left to be consumed in a river of molten lava symbolizing the
insurgent wrath of the French people. One Parisian newspaper encouraged the public to at-
tend, promising “you will see all the tyrants of Europe obliged to devour one another and be
swallowed up, at the end, by a volcano. There's a show made for republican eyes!” Audien-
ces greeted the tyrannicidal scene with laughter and applause. Revolutionary officials were
so impressed with Maréchal's play they distributed thousands of copies to the troops and re-
quisitioned precious gunpowder to keep the volcanic fires of revolution burning through an
extended season. 9
From an historical point of view, the iconic Vesuvius thus represents more than a mere
“special effect” of the Revolutionary period, 1789-1830. Volcanism loomed large in the early