The Work
Athalie was written in 1690-1691 and first performed on January 5, 1691, at Saint-Cyr - the educational institution founded by Madame de Maintenon for daughters of impoverished nobility, under royal patronage of Louis XIV. It was the second of two biblical dramas Racine wrote for the young ladies of Saint-Cyr (the first was Esther, 1689), at the express request of Madame de Maintenon. Its first public performance on the Paris stage did not occur until after Racine's death: it was staged at the Comédie-Française in 1702 and again in 1716, in elaborate theatrical productions that finally established the reputation Voltaire would confirm by calling it Racine's greatest work and 'peut-être le chef-d'oeuvre de l'esprit humain' ('perhaps the masterpiece of the human spirit').
The play is in five acts and approximately 1,800 lines of alexandrine verse, following the classical unities of time (a single day), place (the Temple of Jerusalem), and action (the restoration of the young king Joash). It includes a chorus of young women from the tribe of Levi, whose odes - adapted from the Psalms and the prophets - are among the finest choral poetry in the French dramatic tradition.
Biblical Engagement
2 Kings 11:1-20 and 2 Chronicles 22:10-23:21 are the primary biblical sources for the play's plot. After the death of her son King Ahaziah, Athaliah (daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, and granddaughter of Omri of Israel) seizes the throne of Judah by massacring all the royal seed - including her own grandchildren. One infant, Joash, is hidden by his aunt Jehosheba in the Temple and raised there in secret by the priest Jehoiada. After six years, Jehoiada brings Joash out of hiding, crowns him king, and has Athaliah killed.
Racine's dramatic innovations include the development of Athaliah as a psychologically complex character. In the biblical account she is a villain who appears briefly and is killed; in Racine's play she is the protagonist of the first three acts, a powerful and intelligent queen who is tormented by a recurring dream - of her mother Jezebel drawing her into an abyss - and who feels an inexplicable attraction to the child Eliacin (Joash in disguise), sensing in him both a threat and something she cannot fully understand.
This psychological complexity is Racine's greatest dramatic contribution to the biblical story. Athaliah is not presented as a simple villain but as a woman who has pursued power through terrible means and who is now confronted, in her final days, by the divine purpose she has tried to defeat. Her dream - which Racine takes from the narrative tradition around 2 Kings 9:30-37 (the death of Jezebel) and elaborates imaginatively - is the vehicle through which divine providence makes itself felt to her, and her final words ('Dieu d'Israel, tu l'emportes' - 'God of Israel, thou hast prevailed') are a recognition of defeat that carries, in Racine's presentation, a tragic dignity.
Psalm 74:2 ('Remember thy congregation, which thou hast purchased of old; the rod of thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed; this mount Zion, wherein thou hast dwelt') is one of the psalms that the chorus adapts. The Psalms of the chorus connect the specific historical drama of Joash's restoration to the larger theology of divine faithfulness to Israel: God who purchased this people, who dwells in this Temple, who will not abandon the son of David.
Isaiah 7:14 ('Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel') is part of the prophetic material the play invokes in its treatment of Joash as a type of the Messiah. Jehoiada, the high priest, speaks in the fifth act in a prophetic ecstasy that moves from the specific restoration of Joash to a vision of the messianic future - drawing on Isaiah's Immanuel prophecy and the broader Davidic messianic tradition. This typological dimension, in which the historical events of 2 Kings 11 are read as prefigurations of the coming of Christ, is characteristic of the Jansenist theological tradition in which Racine was formed.
The play's theology of divine providence - operating through human events, often through the very means that seem most threatening to the divine purpose - draws on the narrative theology of the historical books (Joshua, Judges, Kings) and reflects the Jansenist reading of history as the arena of divine predestination and irresistible grace. Athaliah's attempt to destroy the seed of David is not merely a political act but a cosmic one; and its defeat is not merely a political restoration but the vindication of divine faithfulness to the Davidic covenant (2 Samuel 7:12-16).
Author & Context
Jean Racine (1639-1699) was born in La Ferté-Milon, France, and orphaned young. He was educated at the Jansenist school of Port-Royal des Champs, where he received a rigorous classical education in Greek and Latin and was deeply formed by the Jansenist theology of Augustine as interpreted by Cornelius Jansen and Blaise Pascal. Port-Royal's emphasis on human depravity, divine grace, and the fragility of human achievement pervades all of Racine's dramatic work.
After a brilliant decade of secular dramatic work (including Andromaque, 1667; Phèdre, 1677), Racine retired from the theatre following the failure of Phèdre and the influence of his Jansenist confessor. He married in 1677 and had seven children. For twelve years he wrote nothing for the stage. He accepted the position of royal historiographer, writing the official history of Louis XIV's campaigns.
His return to drama for Saint-Cyr was a deliberate turn toward sacred subjects - both as an act of personal piety and as a pedagogical exercise for the young women who would perform and watch the plays. Both Esther and Athalie were intended to teach sacred history and theology through the affective power of theatrical performance, consistent with the Jansenist conviction that the passions, properly directed, could serve divine truth.
The political allegory in Athalie is present but not dominant: the play was written during a period of concern about religious persecution (the Edict of Nantes had been revoked in 1685, initiating the persecution of the Huguenots), and some contemporaries read Athaliah as a figure for William III of England (a Protestant who had just displaced the Catholic James II) or for Louis XIV himself (who had also been known to act as a tyrant). Racine himself was careful to avoid any reading that would compromise his relationship with the court.
Structure and Argument
Act 1 introduces the Temple setting, the festival of Pentecost, and the threat that Athaliah represents to the remaining faithful in Jerusalem. Jehoiada, the high priest, and his wife Josabeth (the biblical Jehosheba) prepare for the confrontation they know is coming.
Act 2 contains the play's most dramatically innovative scene: Athaliah's visit to the Temple, her dream-tormented encounter with Eliacin/Joash, and her growing sense that this child is both a threat and an attraction. The scene demonstrates Racine's mastery of tragic irony: the audience knows what Athaliah cannot know - that the child who haunts her dreams is the legitimate king she has failed to murder.
Acts 3-4 develop the political and military situation as Jehoiada prepares the Levites for the coup and Athaliah vacillates between her instinct to seize the child and her inexplicable reluctance to act against him.
Act 5 presents the denouement: the crowning of Joash, Athaliah's capture, and her death outside the Temple gates. Jehoiada's prophetic vision of the messianic future closes the play on a note of typological hope that transcends the immediate historical moment.
The chorus of Levite women appears at the end of each act with odes that provide theological commentary on the action, drawing on Psalms 74, 89, 132, and other texts. These choral odes are among the finest examples of biblical poetry adapted into French verse in the entire French literary tradition.
Critical Reception
The play was not immediately recognized as a masterpiece in the limited performances at Saint-Cyr. Its full theatrical impact was not felt until the 1716 Paris production. But its literary reputation grew steadily through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Voltaire's praise - in an era when Voltaire was not generally well-disposed toward religious sentiment - was definitive. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called it 'the greatest lyrical poem of all time.' Coleridge, Keats, and later T.S. Eliot all expressed admiration.
Theological Significance
The play's most lasting theological contribution is its demonstration that the Hebrew Bible's historical narratives carry a theological density - a sense of divine purpose working through apparently secular political events - that can be dramatized without reduction. Racine's Athaliah is the biblical antagonist of providence, the human will that sets itself against divine purpose and is destroyed by it; and Joash is the vessel of providence, the apparently fragile instrument through whom God fulfills his covenant. This theological drama is not allegory (the characters remain themselves) but it is profoundly theological: every scene is shadowed by the awareness of divine purpose operating through human freedom.
Legacy
The play established a tradition of biblical drama in France that extended through the nineteenth century (Ernest Legouvé, Alfred de Vigny) and into the twentieth (Jean Giraudoux, Paul Claudel). Its influence on the French theatrical tradition is second only to Phèdre among Racine's works.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study 2 Kings 9-11 (the background narrative of Jehu's revolution, Jezebel's death, and Athaliah's usurpation), 2 Chronicles 22-23 (the Chronicler's version, which emphasizes the priestly role), 2 Samuel 7:8-16 (the Davidic covenant that Athaliah attempts to destroy), Psalm 89 (the divine faithfulness to the Davidic covenant under threat), Isaiah 7:10-17 (the Immanuel prophecy that Jehoiada's vision invokes), and Revelation 12:1-6 (the woman and the child - the cosmic pattern that Racine's play enacts at the historical level).
Further Reading
- Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (1963; English trans. On Racine, 1964) - a structuralist reading of Racine's dramatic world that, though not focused specifically on Athalie, provides indispensable tools for understanding the deep structure of the plays. - Philip Butler, Classicisme et Baroque dans l'oeuvre de Racine (1959) - the best account of the tension between classical form and baroque theological intensity in Athalie, situating the play in the context of seventeenth-century French dramatic aesthetics. - Jean Mesnard, introduction to Oeuvres complètes de Racine (Pléiade edition, 1966) - the standard scholarly edition with comprehensive notes on the biblical sources and the Jansenist theology that shapes the play.