Introduction

The main components of the French welfare system clearly reflect the Bismarckian tradition of social insurance. From 1945 to the late 1970s, social policies expanded as one of the important parts of the Keynesian compromises that underpinned the ‘Trente Glorieuses’. Social spending was seen as favoring economic growth and employment, social insurance transfers as consolidating social integration and (occupational ) solidarity, and welfare state institutions as supporting social peace. Subsequently, however, the economic, social and political functions of the social protection systems have been progressively undermined. After a long period of crisis and resistance throughout the 1970s and 1980s, French social programs are since then being progressively reformed to adapt to the new economic and social environment. As this chapter will show, though, this adaptation is only partial, since it has been implemented through a dualistic strategy of reform. This has divided French welfare and society into two worlds: those still insured by an increasingly contributory complex of public and private insurances, and those dependent on a new tier of basic social protection.

This chapter will first recall the content of post-war compromises on which French social protection was based. It will then analyze the four different phases of the French welfare reform trajectory , focusing on the intellectual, institutional and political mechanisms through which the French welfare system is being progressively transformed. The conclusion will map out the main characteristics of the new social policy institutions and paradigm of the French welfare system.

The Institutional Arrangements Refl ecting the Post-War Compromises

In 1944, the ‘Union nationale’ French government had the ambition of generalizing social protection and achieving universal and uniform coverage. At the time, however, there was a strong distrust of state solutions in social protection among groups who already had access to specific social insurance schemes, within the workers ‘ movement and even from some senior civil servants who held corporatist views, including Pierre Laroque , the so-called ‘founding father’ of the French Sécurité sociale (Merrien 1990).