Jean Racine

Author of Phèdre.

Racine was born on December 22, 1639, into a provincial family of minor government officials. When he was orphaned at age two he went to live with his paternal grandparents, who were adherents of the Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism. In 1655 he was sent to a Jansenist school that gave him, in addition to a thorough education in doctrine, a superior command of the classics of literature. In 1658 Racine went to the Collège d’Hancourt, where he discovered the theatre. In a bid to save him from the sinful excesses of the actor’s life, his family sent him to live with an uncle who was a Jansenist clergyman, but Racine returned to Paris in 1662.

Molière produced Racine’s first two tragedies, La Thébaïde (1664) and Alexandre le grand (1665). Racine followed these with Andromaque (1667), Les Plaideurs (1668), Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), before achieving what are now considered his greatest plays: Bajazet (1672), Mithridate (produced in 1673, the year of his election to the Académie française), Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) and Phèdre (1677).

In 1677 Racine married Catherine de Romanet, with whom he would have two sons and five daughters, and retired from the theatre to become royal historiographer to Louis XIV. His last two plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), were written on commissions from the convent school at Saint-Cyr. He died on April 21, 1699, and was buried, at his request, at Port-Royal, where he had gone to school; his remains were transferred in 1710 to a tomb in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Paris.