War & Peace Quote by Claude Chabrol

Chabrol’s line is a neat little guillotine: it drops with the casualness of a remembered anecdote, then slices straight through the post-1989 victory lap. The genius is in the setup. He “can’t recall who by,” as if the author of that claim doesn’t matter because the claim is the point - a disposable piece of elite punditry that sounded profound in the moment and has aged like spoiled champagne.

The context is the triumphalist haze after the Berlin Wall fell, when Western commentary rushed to declare not just the end of a geopolitical era, but the end of conflict itself: no more class war, no more ideological struggle, history neatly wrapped. Chabrol refuses the fairy tale. He doesn’t argue policy or economics; he exposes the social position that makes such optimism possible. “Only someone with money” isn’t a moral jab so much as a diagnostic: if you’re insulated from precarity, “class war” can look like a relic, a bad old movie that stopped playing when the credits rolled in 1989.

As a director famous for dissecting the bourgeoisie with a cool, almost clinical malice, Chabrol is also defending his subject matter. If class war is “over,” then the crimes, hypocrisies, and quiet violences of everyday privilege become mere personal quirks. He insists they’re structural - and ongoing. The subtext is bleakly funny: the Wall didn’t end class conflict; it just let the winners pretend it had, because they controlled the story.