Wealth & Money Quote by Jean Anouilh

Anouilh’s line slices through the polite fiction that Providence is an impartial referee. The first half, “God is on everyone’s side,” mimics the soothing rhetoric nations use when they want slaughter to feel like destiny. It’s the language of sermons before battles, of flags blessed on Sunday so they can be raised over rubble on Monday. Then the pivot lands like a trapdoor: “in the last analysis,” God somehow ends up allied with “plenty of money and large armies.” The joke isn’t theological; it’s forensic. Anouilh is naming the mechanism by which power recruits morality after the fact.

The intent is less to deny belief than to expose how belief is operationalized. “Everyone” gets to claim God because God functions as a blank check for certainty. When outcomes arrive, the winners retroactively become the proof of divine favor. Money and armies aren’t just material advantages; they’re narrative machines. They buy the printing presses, the speeches, the monuments, the schoolbooks that turn victory into virtue.

As a playwright working in 20th-century Europe, Anouilh had front-row seats to moral language being weaponized by regimes, resistance movements, collaborators, and liberators alike. His cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning about how quickly lofty ideals get laundered through force. The line works because it refuses the audience the comfort of choosing sides. It suggests the real “miracle” of history is how reliably sanctity follows power, not the other way around.