Success Quote by Pierre Laval

Laval’s line isn’t a prediction so much as a permission slip: an attempt to make collaboration with Nazi Germany sound like hard-headed realism. The structure is telling. He starts with an “inevitable” chain reaction - Soviet victory equals Bolshevism sweeping Europe - then presents his preference as grim necessity. That rhetorical move launders ideology through fatalism. If the future is already decided, choosing Germany becomes less a moral choice than a defensive reflex.

The subtext is class panic. “Bolshevism” here isn’t merely a foreign system; it’s a catch-all for the collapse of a social order that men like Laval had spent careers protecting: property, hierarchy, and the authority of the state as managed by traditional elites. By pairing “Soviet Russia and England,” he also tries to implicate liberal democracies in the alleged communist contagion, implying that Britain’s war aims are either naive or indistinguishable from Stalin’s. It’s a neat bit of political jiu-jitsu: anti-Nazi resistance gets recoded as a left-wing project.

Context makes it darker. Laval was a central figure in Vichy France, where “anti-Bolshevism” became a moral alibi for repression at home and cooperation with German power. The quote signals not just fear of communism but a willingness to bet Europe’s fate on a murderous regime to avoid social transformation. That is the crux: he frames fascist victory as the lesser evil, but the real priority is preserving a familiar order, even at catastrophic human cost.