When was Jean Racing baptized? Where did she die?

Jean Racine, in full Jean-Baptiste Racine, (baptized December 22, 1639, La Ferté-Milon, France—died April 21, 1699, Paris), French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he wrote between 1664 and 1691, notably Andromaque (first performed 1667, published 1668), Britannicus (first performed 1669, published 1670), Bérénice (first performed 1670, published 1671), Bajazet (first performed and published 1672), Phèdre (first performed and published 1677), and Athalie (first performed and published 1691).

Racine was born into a provincial family of minor administrators who were financially comfortable and socially ambitious. His mother died 13 months after he was born, and his father died two years later. His maternal grandparents took him in, and, when his grandmother, Marie des Moulins, became a widow, she brought Racine with her, perhaps as early as 1646, to live at the convent of Port-Royal des Champs near Paris. Since a group of devout scholars and teachers had founded a school there, Racine had the opportunity to study the classics of Latin and Greek literature with distinguished masters. The school was steeped in the austere Roman Catholic reform movement that came to be known as Jansenism, which had recently been condemned by the church as heretical. The Jansenists participated in the centuries-long debate over the primacy of free will or of divine omnipotence in the process of salvation. Inspired by the writings of Saint Augustine, as transmitted by Cornelius Otto Jansen, bishop of Ypres, in his work Augustinus (1640), the Jansenists believed that salvation was a gift—a grace—that was accorded only by God and that free will played little role in the process. For these Augustinians, life on earth was to be a rigorous pursuit of penance for original sin. Since the French monarchy suspected the Jansenists of being not only theologically but also politically subversive, Racine’s lifelong relationship with his former friends and teachers remained ambivalent, inasmuch as the artist ever sought admittance into the secular realm of court society. His former teachers remained extremely disappointed in a man who had used his excellent education as a means of succeeding in a profession that Port-Royal considered an abomination, because the theatre promoted illusion as a distraction from reflection on the wretched human condition. The degree to which his upbringing at Port-Royal inspired Racine’s tragic vision is a question unlikely to be answered with any precision, given the other influences exerted on him, such as those of Greek and Roman tragedy, the Bible, and life itself.

After leaving Port-Royal in 1653, Racine transferred to the College of Beauvais for almost two years and then returned to Port-Royal in October 1655 to complete his studies in rhetoric. The school at Port-Royal was closed by the authorities in 1656, but Racine was allowed to stay on there. When he was 18, the Jansenists sent him to study law at the College of Harcourt in Paris. Racine had both the disposition and the talent to thrive in the cultural climate of Paris, where to conform and to please—in Racine’s case, to please by his pen—were indispensable assets. One of the first manifestations of Racine’s intentions was his composition of a sonnet in praise of Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the prime minister of France, for successfully concluding a peace treaty with Spain (1659). This tribute reveals Racine’s strategy of social conquest through what was to become a vocation and a mission: to be acknowledged as the greatest literary figure of his age, in effect the Euripides of classical France.
Jean Racine was baptized on December 22, 1639. She died in Paris on April 21, 1699.