RTrue an institution will have been so celebrated and as criticized. Created in the momentum of the Liberation, Social Security celebrates its 80th anniversary in a paradoxical climate: its founding objective – guaranteeing “to everyone that in all circumstances will have the necessary means to ensure their subsistence and that of their family in decent conditions” – remains of an obvious news. Pillar of the French redistributive social model, she is however regularly accused of “costing too much”, or even plumber the French economy.
Recurrent, these criticisms forget that it is as much a fundamental element of intergenerational solidarity as an investment for the future: by preserving health, by reducing poverty and by absorbing individual risks such as collective crises-let’s think of the pandemic of COVID-19-, it avoids incomparably heavier economic and social costs.
How can the “security” face the aging of the population, the increase in health costs, the rise of precarious jobs, as many challenges that weaken its funding? To answer this question, history cannot predict the future, but it can help think. One of his many lessons is that the effectiveness of social security lies precisely in its universal and united character.
Roots plunging into long history
By plunging into the heart of public archives, and thanks to a large collection of oral testimonies carried out by the Social Security History Committee, historians and historians continue to shed light on the “French” social protection system, following the pioneer Henri Hatzfeld (1919-2019).
The analysis of the stages of its legal construction for a century and a half, the updating of the “little hands” of often forgotten social protection, or the comparison of the French model with other experiences in Europe and in the world teach us a lot: the last delivery of the Social protection history review (n ° 18, 2025) commemorates this “1945 moment” by having the national trajectories dialogue for eighty years, from Japan to Belgium, from Germany to the United Kingdom, from Italy to the United States.
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