80 years of social security: the compromise of the century

On October 4, 1945, France invented the general social security scheme. Until then, everything depended on the profession, the fortune, the birth. Social insurance, created in the 1930s, covered only part of the employees. The civil servants had their mutuals, the independent farmers, the craftsmen and the traders, their private insurance. Another world …

The system was exploded in more than a thousand private, employer or denominational funds. The rules were variable, low services, slow reimbursements. When a peasant was to have his son operated on with an appendicitis, he had to sell part of his herd. “Before the Société, we treated when you could be treated,” recalls an 80 -year -old man, questioned by television on the occasion of the twenty years of the system*.

At the release, the strengths of the resistance want something else. Gaullists, Communists, Christian Democrats, Monarchists … The fraternity of arms requires unity. As early as 1943, the National Council of Resistance sketched the model in its post-war program: happy days.

Beyond politics

But most of the work is carried out by the provisional government (GPRF). Directed by Charles de Gaulle from August 1944, he repealed the laws of Vichy and prepared the return of republican legality. The writing of the two founding orders of October 4 and 19, 1945 was entrusted to Pierre Laroque, a senior official. A month later, Ambroise Croizat, a communist, who became Minister of Labor and Employment, gave body to the reform.

Christian Democrats are wary of the single cash register, which plans to bring together family allowances; She may weaken their impact, they think. The Gaullists fear the union and communist grip. All nevertheless accept the principle. “This question must be settled outside any political consideration,” says Gaulle.

Social security is thus born from a compromise between the Gaullist will of modernization and workers and union aspirations. A patient, patient work, which had to wait until the 1960s to see all of the French covered. In 2025, the lesson remains. Even divided, the nation can unite to build the future.

* Extract from The course of history, “October 4, 1945, Social Security was born (happy!)»»on France Culture, November 20, 2024.