Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914-1947 (review)

The modern French welfare state, now among the most generous in Europe, was founded in the aftermath of World War II. It was the brainchild of Pierre Laroque, a career civil servant who dreamed ofconstructing a single, universal system that would cover all citizens against the principal risks of life in an industrial society, administered democratically by the beneficiaries themselves. Laroque, however, did not get all that he wanted. The distribution of welfare payments emanated from funds or caisses run by state-supervised boards composed of employers and elected worker or peasant representatives. Though democratic, the regime was neither unitary nor universal. One network of caisses handled family allocations and a second, social-security payments. The social- security network was organized along sectoral lines. Workers contributed to one scheme and peasants to another. Liberal professionals and the self-employed opted not to participate in Laroque's welfare system at all.

What Dutton sets out to explain in this dense and always informative book is the gap between Laroque's dream and the impressive, but fragmented, welfare edifice that he in fact created. The basic outline of France's welfare institutions, Dutton argues, took shape in the 1920s and 1930s. Laroque had to work around structures already in place, defended by entrenched interests that constrained him to make unwanted compromises.

Dutton identifies three powerful sets of interests. The first crystallized about the issue of family welfare provision. Labor disturbances in 1919/20 exerted a strong upward pressure on wages. Employers, the metallurgical sector in the lead, fought back. They set up employer-managed caisses d'allocations familiales that paid out benefits to workers with large families. The more children, the more substantial were the payments, but workers had to demonstrate a record of good character to qualify. Labor unions reviled the scheme, understanding it as a damper on worker militancy. Pro-family social Catholics, however, were enthusiastic, as were pronatalists worried about demographic decline. Not least of all, rank-and-file workers, at least those with large families, found some virtue in the scheme. By 1930, more than 200 caisses existed, covering an estimated four million wage earners.

More powerful still was the mutualist interest. Mutual-aid societies had proliferated in France since the turn of the century, providing members with medical benefits and life insurance. The movement was well-connected to the Radical Party, France's largest political grouping until the 1930s. The Party's governing creed, celebrating the virtues of self-help and voluntary association, was scarcely different from that of the mutualist movement itself. Indeed, party and movement recruited from the same social milieu, the "broad middle" of French society: artisans, journeymen, shopkeepers, and clerks. By the end of the 1920s, about 6million members in all were served by the mutualist movement.

Dutton's third set of interests, agricultural syndicalism, is not treated in the same detail as its family-allocation and mutualist counterparts, but three points are clear. Syndicats agricoles were multi-purpose bodies, standing at "the center of a web of agricultural services and institutions" (140). From mutual insurance societies to savings-and-loan associations to rural cooperatives, they were committed to preserving an independent rural welfare system, distinct from urban and industrial systems, and they had influential political patrons. Certain syndicats agricoles were republican in orientation, but the dominant strain, represented by Jacques Leroy-Ladurie's Union nationale des syndicats agricoles ( UNSA ), was corporatist and conservative.

The Republic, under pressure from labor in the interwar years, felt compelled to act on the welfare front, but its not inconsiderable achievement in this domain was shaped as much, if not more, by the interest structure that it confronted as by the aspirations of the working-class left. A first round of reform culminated in the social-insurance...