On Monday, 7 November 1929, two weeks after the Wall Street Crash of 25 October, André Tardieu presented his Ministerial Declaration to the Chamber of Deputies. Abandoning the vague platitudes traditional on such occasions, he announced a five-year programme of public expenditure financed not by increased taxation or borrowing, but by spending part of the large Treasury surpluses accumulated during the preceding three years of financial prosperity. Later Tardieu was to claim that he had predicted the economic crisis and that his expenditure plan had been intended to forestall it, But there is no evidence for such an assertion. The plan was announced as part of a ‘prosperity policy’. It was justified by pointing out that the development of such a programme had been neglected during the years immediately after the war in favour of the reconstruction of the devastated regions; then had followed the financial crisis; only now was it possible to modernize the economic infrastructure of the nation. No mention of an imminent crisis to be prevented. Indeed it would have been surprising if there had been: Tardieu's plan was conceived in a world of prosperity, for a world of prosperity. And even when the crisis did begin to affect France it was not the ‘economic blizzard’ of which Ramsay MacDonald had spoken in Britain; rather it was a slow paralysis affecting different sectors of the economy with unequal intensity, thereby encouraging illusions that France would not be hit and delaying any reaction from France's political leaders.