Modern commentators have presented the Livre des fais as an example of a fundamental tension between the medieval ideal of knighthood and the brutal reality hidden behind that fantasy. Johan Huizinga famously argued that terrible disasters like the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had threatened to expose the truth about chivalry, but make-believe heroism and courtly love still continued to exercise a powerful influence over French aristocratic society and culture. He illustrated this by citing the biography of Boucicaut, with its ‘depiction of an ideal knight’, which celebrated an image of piety, courtliness, fidelity and austerity that had very little connection with his true story. Echoing Huizinga, Raymond Kilgour described the biography of Boucicaut as one of the ‘pious accounts of impeccable heroes [in which] mediaeval youths found objects for their intense hero-worship, quite undisturbed at the disparity between the literary figure and the real man’.

More recent scholars have gone further in arguing that the celebration of an idealized vision of French knighthood in the Livre des fais was a self-consciously reactionary and reformist response to a society in crisis. Denis Lalande claimed that the work was born out of the ills of the time, arguing that the biographer presented Boucicaut as a paragon of knighthood in order to assert the continued importance of these idealized values and behaviour, and thereby demonstrate that the old ethic of knighthood had not lost its usefulness. Similarly, Elisabeth Gaucher-Rémond has characterized the Livre des fais as an effort to rehabilitate French knighthood itself after the disaster at Nicopolis. She has described the biography as a reaction to the disorder and corruption of the age, and in particular the malaise that overwhelmed knighthood at the start of the fifteenth century. Responding to this crisis, the Livre des fais championed moral order and the ancient virtues of knighthood and courtliness.

This view of the biography of Boucicaut as a reactionary and conservative response to the pressures upon chivalry in France is enticing, but it is essential to recognize that the author gave no indication that this was his self-conscious goal.