[1] The second son and the seventh and last child of the celebrated tragic dramatist Jean Racine, he was interested in poetry from childhood but was dissuaded from trying to make it his career by the poet Boileau on the grounds that the gift never existed in two successive generations.

But, because of the poem's Jansenist inspiration, Cardinal de Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, blocked the poet's admission to the Académie Française, and instead Racine was induced to accept the post of inspector-general of taxes at Marseille in Provence.

[2] For the next 24 years, although he continued to write poetry, Racine worked as a tax inspector in various provincial towns and cities, marrying in 1728.

In November 1755, he lost his only son and his daughter-in-law when they were swept away by the tsunami from the Lisbon earthquake while on honeymoon at Cadiz in Spain.

It was around this time that Racine wrote his last published work, an essay on the famous feral child of 18th-century France Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc whom he had interviewed and written of in his philosophical poem L'Épître II sur l'homme (1747) (Second Epistle on Man).