In 1932 Lucien Laurat summed up his vision of the world crisis: ‘in front of the very eyes of the hungry masses who produced them, coffee is thrown into the sea, wheat is burnt, cotton destroyed’. There was nothing unusual in this choice of example: for writers both inside and outside France the destroyed coffee of Brazil had become an image d'Epinal of the futility and waste of economic crisis. But out of this irrational world of economic chaos developed a search for order and rationality, for organization and control. And it was this search which lay at the root of the flowering of ‘plans’ in France – and not only in France – during the 1930s. We must not exaggerate the novelty or importance of a word: the idea of ‘plans’ had already enjoyed a certain vogue during the 1920s as a reaction against that previous example of anarchy and human folly, the First World War. Given a certain currency by Rathenau and the advocates of Planwirtschaft, the word had been later popularized by the First Soviet Plan. Two examples demonstrate that by the beginning of the 1930s, the idea was well established in France: first, the series of books, predating the crisis, published by Georges Valois under the general heading Crises and Plans; secondly, the review Plans, appearing between January 1931 and 1933 and including Lagardelle and Le Corbusier on its editorial boards.