Antoine-Marin Lemierre was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 dramatist and poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

.

He was born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, into a poor family, but
found a patron in the collector-general of taxes, Dupin

André Marie Jean Jacques Dupin

André Marie Jean Jacques Dupin , commonly called Dupin the Elder, was a French advocate, president of the chamber of deputies and of the Legislative Assembly....

, whose secretary he became. Lemierre gained his first success on the stage with Hypermnestre (1758); Titre (1761) and Idomne (1764) failed on account of the subjects. Artaxerce, modelled on Metastasio, and Guillaume Tell were produced in 1766; other successful tragedies were La Veuve de Malabar (1770) and Barnavelt (1784). He was admitted to the Académie Française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

 in 1780.

Lemierre revived Guillaume Tell in 1786 with enormous success. After the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

 he professed great remorse for the production of a play inculcating revolutionary principles, and there is no doubt that the horror of the excesses he witnessed hastened his death. Lemierre published La Peinture (1769), based on a Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 poem by the abbé de Marsy, and a poem in six cantos. Les Fastes, ou les usages de lannie (1779), an unsatisfactory imitation of Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

's Fasti.

His Œuvres (1810) contain a notice of Lemierre by R Perrin. and his Œuvres choisies (1811) one by FJM Fayolle.