I have always had simple ideas in politics. People take me for a shyster, but they don't know me. What I do is so simple that it looks to those who d… - Pierre Laval

I tried to organize peace in Europe and I thought that the first thing to do was to bring France and Italy together. I thought that this was the first link in a chain which would one day lead us to an agreement with Germany.

We will always be neighbours of Germany. We face the alternative of reaching an agreement with her or of clashing every twenty years on the battlefield.

Just as war was originally waged between towns, then between countries and recently between empires, so, in future, it would be waged between continents. He did not believe in a Franco-German conflict...but sooner or later the Russians and the Chinese would launch an attack upon Europe. We had to make ourselves safe against this.