Jean-Joseph RACINE

The story

Born at Versailles on 20 March 1765, Jean-Joseph Racine made his career in the customs administration and reached the rank of divisional director. The post was in no way a minor one under the Empire and the Restoration: the customs financed the State, enforced the Continental Blockade and then the protectionist tariffs, and employed thousands of agents spread along the frontiers and the town tolls — one of the largest civil administrations in the country. A divisional director ran a whole part of it.

He died on 30 August 1832 at Belleville, then an independent commune at the gates of Paris, covered with vines, quarries and dance gardens, an hour by carriage from the Grands Boulevards — it was there that the Paris middle class kept its summer houses, before the annexation of 1860. His wife, Marie Gabrielle Leroux, born in Paris on 11 November 1770, died in that same house on 29 May 1853: she would outlive him by twenty-one years.

What makes this grave remarkable is the way it writes its dates. The inscription is cut entirely in Roman numerals: “né à Versailles le XX mars MDCCLXV”, “décédé à Belleville le XXX août MDCCCXXXII”, “née à Paris le XI novembre MDCCLXX”. You have to count in order to read, and the hurried visitor walks past without knowing when these people died. The effect on a slab is startling: where the eye expects four figures, it meets a line of capital letters to be deciphered one by one.

The practice is not unique at Père-Lachaise — Ferdinand Flocon, in Division 53, also has his epitaph in Roman numerals — but it stays rare, and it marks a period: the one in which Latin was still the language of the monument, and cutting a date in Arabic figures would have looked trivial. The device gives these inscriptions a solemnity ordinary dates do not have, at the cost of being read at once. The grave stands in Division 27, and the cemetery association ranks the monument among the notable monuments.