Leadership Quote by Pierre Laval

A line like this turns surrender into a housekeeping task: take stock, cut losses, protect the remainder. Laval’s phrasing is chillingly managerial. “We have given” shifts catastrophe into the passive voice of inevitability, as if Europe were mislaid property rather than a continent being conquered through violence. It also quietly spreads responsibility. “We” can mean France’s leaders, France’s institutions, even France itself - a rhetorical fog that dilutes culpability while smuggling collaboration into the realm of common sense.

The second sentence does the real work. “Let us try” performs modesty, the pose of pragmatic restraint, while “hold on” recasts capitulation as prudence. It’s the language of triage, not politics: stop the bleeding, accept the amputation. The subtext is a bargain offered to both occupier and occupied. To Germany, it signals willingness to cooperate for a stable order. To French listeners, it sells compliance as the only rational way to preserve “what we have got left” - territory, institutions, perhaps the illusion of sovereignty under Vichy.

Context sharpens the intent. As a senior Vichy figure who would become the regime’s chief architect of collaboration, Laval is not describing defeat so much as normalizing it. The sentence tries to launder moral collapse through scarcity logic: when the world shrinks, ethics become a luxury item. It’s propaganda in a minor key - not rousing, but sedating - designed to make collaboration feel like the last responsible adult choice.