Alain Chartier

Alain Chartier (c. 1385 – between 1430 and 1446) was a French poet and political writer.

He was born in Bayeux, to a family marked by considerable ability. His eldest brother Guillaume became bishop of Paris; and Thomas became notary to the king. Alain studied, as his elder brother had done, at the University of Paris. His earliest poem is the Livre des quatre dames (1416), written after the battle of Agincourt. This was followed by the Débat du reveille-matin (1422–26?), La Belle Dame sans Mercy (1424), and others.

He followed the fortunes of the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, acting in the triple capacity of clerk, notary, and financial secretary.

In 1422 he wrote the famous Quadrilogue invectif. The interlocutors in this dialogue are France herself and the three orders of the state. Chartier lays bare the abuses of the feudal army and the sufferings of the peasants. He rendered an immense service to his country by maintaining that the cause of France, though desperate to all appearance, was not yet lost if the contending factions could lay aside their differences in the face of the common enemy.

In 1424 Chartier was sent on an embassy to Germany, and three years later he accompanied to Scotland the mission sent to negotiate the marriage of James I's daughter, Margaret, then not four years old, with the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI. In 1429 he wrote the Livre d'esperance, which contains a fierce attack on the nobility and clergy. He was the author of a diatribe on the courtiers of Charles VII. entitled Le Curial, translated into English by William Caxton about 1484.

The date of his death is to be placed about 1430. A Latin epitaph, discovered in the 18th century, says, however, that he was Archdeacon of Paris, and declares that he died in the city of Avignon in 1449. This is obviously not authentic, for Alain described himself as a simple clerc and certainly died long before 1449.

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