Athalie worships Baal and imposes this new faith upon her people. A small number, led by the high priest, remain loyal to the ancient religion. They have managed to save the queen's grandson — the legitimate heir to the throne — from the massacre, and are raising him in secret.

Following Phèdre, his last great success, Racine chose to devote himself to his role as historiographer to King Louis XIV and to withdraw from the theatre, in keeping with the religious spirit of the time. Ten years later, Madame de Maintenon persuaded him to write again — but for the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, the religious boarding school she directed. He composed the tragedy Esther. In 1691, the Marquise commissioned a further text drawn from a biblical subject, which would become Athalie. For Voltaire, this play was perhaps "the masterpiece of the human mind."

In a seventeenth century marked by debate over the representation of religious subjects, Racine wrote Athalie from a biblical source, for a religious institution. Corneille, by contrast, drew freely on the lives of the saints for fictional material of great theatrical power in Polyeucte.
 

Presented as an oratorio-style reading with musical accompaniment, the Soirée Répertoire celebrates a major author or work from the Comédie-Française repertoire (p. 16). It aims to bring to life texts that are rarely performed, and invites the audience, before the reading, to an introduction to the play, its writing and its context.

The evening will be preceded by a presentation in the Mounet-Sully Hall at 7 p.m.