RACHIS. - King of the Lombards, formerly Duke of Friuli, an advocate of an understanding with the Papacy, ascended the throne in 744, following a movement that overthrew Hildeprand, successor and continuer of the policy of Liutprand, to whom Pope Zachary may not have been entirely unconnected. As soon as he ascended the throne, R. concluded a twenty-year truce with the Byzantines, but his policies and the favors he granted to the "Romans"—he had married a Roman woman, Tassia—were disapproved of by those favoring a national policy. The laws he published in 746 reveal, along with his inability to maintain order and justice, the imminence of a revolt by the nobles and their alliance with the enemies of the kingdom.
Traditional historiography asserts that R. was induced to resume Liutprand’s aggressive policy for reasons
RACHIS — King R. Miniature from the Codex legum Langobardorum. Cava dei Tirreni, Badia Library, cod. 22 (11th century).
---
RACINE, Jean. — Born in La Ferté-Milon on December 22, 1639, he was orphaned in early childhood and educated at Beauvais, later retiring to Port-Royal. There, as a young man, he was summoned to Port-Royal in 1655. He then studied in Paris at the Collège d’Harcourt, from which he graduated in 1659, before immersing himself in worldly life and attempting a literary career. He stayed in Uzès, in Languedoc, with an uncle who was vicar general of the diocese; in 1663, upon returning to Paris, he turned to the theater.
For a time, the milestones of his life coincide with those of his works: 1664, *La Thébaïde ou Les frères ennemis*; 1665, *Alexandre le Grand* (both performed by Molière’s company); 1667, *Andromaque*; 1668, *Les Plaideurs* (his only comedy); 1669, *Britannicus*; 1670, *Bérénice*; 1672, *Bajazet*; 1673, *Mithridate*; 1674, *Iphigénie*; 1677, *Phèdre*. A varied chronicle weaves through this catalog: loves he coldly calculated to serve his glory as an author, theatrical rivalries with the great Corneille, cabals and intrigues among patrons and enemies; and an overly harsh and mocking polemic against the rigorism of his Jansenist teachers at Port-Royal, the *Lettre à l’auteur des Hérésies imaginaires et des deux Visionnaires* (1666), in which, however, he investigates the value of morality and truth in tragedy. After *Phèdre*, he abandoned the theater, married Catherine de Romanet the same year, and, as historiographer to the King alongside Boileau, allowed himself to be distracted by new duties as a family man and courtier. He returned to the stage—now a collegiate setting, removed from the rough glare of public attention but perhaps more refined in its echoes and certainly more precious—at the invitation of Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV; and the young ladies of Saint-Cyr performed *Esther* in 1689 and, in a reading rather than a staged performance, *Athalie* in 1691—tragedies that transfigure events into choral lyricism, a path he continued in the *Cantiques spirituels* (1694). His conduct became increasingly thoughtful and religious: he composed himself in great serenity of expectation and died with exemplary resignation and fortitude. He requested to be buried at Port-Royal.
His life was always attentive to opportunities yet detached from them: from his idyllic interpretation of the solitudes of Port-Royal to his courtly service to Louis XIV, without concealing from the King—an ardent anti-Jansenist—his devotion. In the sacred drama of *Esther*, he insinuated courtly allusions to the decline of the royal favorite, the Marquise de Montespan; in letters to his son, he applied the rigorous method of education from which he himself had cheerfully escaped as a youth. He accommodated himself to different environments but preserved, within himself, a virtue and strength of ultimate appeal, a voice and prayer that transcended the circles that had welcomed and carried him. Thus it was with his tragedies (and with his sole comedy, one may note the extreme play of cosmic forces, the grotesque tension that overwhelms even the occasion for laughter): amid a thousand constraints of academic rules (among others, the unities of time, place, and action), of stage conventions (which prescribed the sequence of entrances, the measure of dialogue and monologue, the form of the drama), which summoned the event from every side only to withdraw from its immediacy, the color was now pathetic, now eloquent in its bursts—without renouncing anything, he discovered within these limits his own magnificent freedom. He always knew how to place himself beyond fiction, beyond the very enchantment and surrender to which his characters succumb, a pitiless analyst yet a compassionate tragedian.
His themes are highly varied, though within a small number and with the constant but apparent reduction of tragic figures to the canons of fashion and the court; repeatedly striking the theme of love: the light of poetry invests even the most hidden events with clarity, and the most desperate and perverse characters, from Roxane (*Bajazet*) to Phèdre, redeem themselves in their very submission to confession—purity of truth before the light of poetic beauty. Each era read in his works confirmation of its own predilections: the Italian 18th century, after Metastasio, loved him for his sweet persuasiveness; the French 19th century, after Baudelaire, for his fearless firmness. The elusive subtlety seems to those who observe such heroic and somber life, such a history spanning from the Thebans of Greece to the Turks of the Seraglio, from Nero’s empire to Titus’s, from the camp at Aulis to the palace of Ahasuerus, from the East of Mithridates to the East of Jerusalem and the Temple (though ever-present is the court of the Sun King)—a murky descent into the shadowed zones of being, compared to the free will of Corneille’s heroes. Yet under his guidance, the spectator, and more so the reader, and best of all civilization itself—which, constrained by an utterly perfected literary form, must make external decisions—traverses an audacious journey toward a final solitude: in the arena of lofty eloquence, the Corneillian hero decided a destiny of greatness; but in his desert, the Racinian soul decides an eternal fate.