Written between April 12 and August 31, 1422, as France faced accumulating military setbacks in the Hundred Years’ War and intense civil strife between the Armagnac and Burgundian parties, Alain Chartier's urgent, impassioned Quadrilogue invectif presents itself as a last-ditch literary effort to avert the ruin of a realm ‘qui entre destruction et ressource chancelle douloureusement’ (‘tottering torturously between destruction and deliverance’). Chartier, a career administrator and diplomat in the service of the house of Valois as well as a prolific author in French and Latin, announces himself as a ‘lointaing immitateur des orateurs’ (‘distant emulator of the orators’: 3.6). He belongs to a fifteenth-century cohort of would-be public intellectuals whose textual activism not only documents and satirizes the troubles of their tumultuous age, but also aspires to intervene in and reform current political, moral and spiritual affairs. Chartier's particular objective in the Quadrilogue is to think through the causes of and possible remedies for the dire straits in which France finds itself. He does so using the form of the songe politique, which adapts the literary conceit of the narrated dream vision and the associated poetics of personification allegory as instruments of historical representation and polemical critique.

Although Chartier initially invokes the Christian historiographical topos that links political crisis to spiritual malaise, he quickly diagnoses both France's problem and its solution as principally ideological. The fading spark of ‘l’affection publique’ (‘care for public affairs’: 9.24), he contends, needs rekindling in a French populace that has fallen prey to divisive individualism, faction and discord. Chartier's virtuoso play to ‘mettre fin en ces grefves discentions’ (‘put an end to these grievous conflicts’: 58.9) by rhetorical means has become a critical touchstone for the late-medieval ‘politique du sentiment qu’on appellera patriotisme’ (‘politics of feeling that will be called patriotism’). Acting as a kind of ‘prophète de la patrie’ (‘national prophet’), the writer deploys an idealized image of the realm or nation that bases its claim to its citizens’ loyal service less on an abstract code of duty and obligation than on appeals to political emotion. Scholarly accounts of the Quadrilogue underscore its unequivocally patriotic tenor and examine its affective articulation of politics through complementary representations of the two key figures whom medieval illuminators consistently pictured presiding over the text: the politically committed author-figure and the allegorical personification of France as a distraught and eloquent lady.