The process of reforming the active solidarity income (henceforth RSA) was launched at the end of 2007, which was at the beginning of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency. RSA replaced the minimum insertion income (RMI), which had been in place since 1988. RMI had introduced both a guaranteed minimum income and measures that would aim to reintegrate the recipient into society and/or the labour market, and was organised in a contract between the recipient and the state. RSA entailed a negative tax scheme to increase incentives for recipients to take low-paid, part-time work, while also introducing a number of instruments and obligations with the aim of increasing the activity of the unemployed person. The reform also introduced intensified control of the financial behaviour of the recipient's household. Figure 6.1 provides an overview of the key events during the debate up to the passing of RSA.

The chapter is structured as follows. The first section analyses the creation of RMI with a view to presenting how the scheme was the result of compromises between certain cities of unemployment, as well as looking into subsequent modifications of the scheme. The next section addresses how the justification of RSA was closely linked to a specific critique of RMI where certain cities of unemployment were mobilised while others were denounced. The third section presents how RSA qualified and aimed to increase the worth of unemployed subjects belonging to a number of cities. The following three sections present three test situations involving, first, the behaviour of the recipient; second, the threshold between part-time and full-time work; and third, the financing of RSA. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the sedimentation of tests in the adopted law and a brief look at reforms of succeeding governments.

The rise of the will to include the excluded

As mentioned in Chapter 4, the French postwar unemployment system was mainly composed of corporatist, contribution-based schemes and a tax-financed system of ‘assistance’ for the most needy. The 1970s and 1980s state-led schemes of ‘solidarity’ were established to target the increasing number of unemployed people who had exhausted their rights and hence fell between the unemployment insurance and assistance systems. Despite the introduction of solidarity schemes in the 1980s, there were still groups without any rights to support (Béraud and Eydoux, 2011, p 132).