Conclusion

Summary

Disparate historical forces have been at work on social welfare in France since the nineteenth century. Louis Napoleon's boost to the mutual movement and the 1898 Charte de la Mutualité launched a highly resilient regime of voluntary social protections that closely matched France's liberal temperament up to the First World War. The mutual movement dutifully respected the distinction between social insurance and assistance, a separation that held credence across political affiliation and class. This distinction was also important in family welfare. Even during the 1920s when they enjoyed complete freedom from government regulation, employers rarely justified their voluntary family allowances as charity. Rather family allowances became part and parcel of the scientific rationalization of industry, labor pacification, and the fight against depopulation. The 1920s also witnessed a convergence of forces that instigated state efforts to expand and mandate social insurance. France's recovery of its territories in Alsace and Lorraine, where Germany had developed a successful form of compulsory social insurance, served as an immediate impetus to reform. The mutual movement too, although initially divided over the issue of obligation, served as a proximate cause for the creation of France's interwar social insurance protections. Mutual leaders recognized both the momentum of international developments in favor of compulsory insurance and the increasing power of the industrial working-class whose affinity with mutual assistance was weak at best. Meanwhile their own core constituency of independent artisans and shopkeepers was suffering a relative decline in the face of urbanization and industrialization.