In early 1949, Eugéne Claudius-Petit, the new Minister of Reconstruction and Urbanism, had announced a campaign to build 20,000 dwellings a year for forty years, a measure of his determination to shift priorities from post-war reconstruction to the longer-term goals of renovation and modernisation of France's cities. For Claudius-Petit, the State had a duty to offer assistance not just to the sinistrés de la guerre but, as he put it, to the sinistrés de la vie, to the long suffering victims of France's inadequate housing conditions. To do so France had to build more housing and to do so more quickly. Since the Liberation there had been general agreement that the only way to achieve this was to transform the way that housing was built and that ‘industrialisation’ in one form or another was critical to doing so.