Around the turn of the fifteenth century it might well have seemed to many French people that the world was going quite mad. King Charles VI's scarcely mentionable mental illness was soon mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. Allusions to suicidal impulses and acts recur in an astonishing number of works composed in the first three decades of the fifteenth century: in sermons (Jean Gerson's Vivat rex), political pamphlets (the anonymous Songe véritable), mirrors for princes (Jacques Legrand's Livre des bonnes meurs), diaries and chronicles (by Michel Pintoin, Juvénal des Ursins, and the bourgeois de Paris), poetry and prosimetra (Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance). In these texts, self-violence is an act marked by political implications that far exceed individual mental health concerns. Indeed, rather than constituting a symptom or manifestation of a mental disability, suicidal acts are presented in early fifteenth-century French literature and chronicle as the cause of a disability of a different sort: a direct attack on a surprisingly corporeal body politic. Exploring the intersection of the physiological and the metaphorical realms, we will see how the rhetoric of suicide brings together discourses of bodily disability and political disunity.