French social security system: the French revolution - the second half of the 20th century

This article presents a general historical and philosophical overview of the French social policy in 1789-1945 and aims to examine its main principles and the way how French philosophy contributed to the emergence of the "welfare state", a social concept consolidated in continental Europe. The study appeals to a range of philosophical and political theories of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the before and aftermath of World War II. It starts with a brief analysis of main works of Ch.-L. Montesquieu and J.-J. Rousseau who were the first authors to point out the political organization of a relationship between the state and its citizens, and legal rights to social security resulting from it. The French Revolution being a symbol of widespread popular discontent brings reforms and new philosophical ideas to the eighteenth-century society in the field of social aid: socialist, egalitarian and communist theories. It created a new concept of social security based on common law and rules of social solidarity and justice opposed to the nineteenth-century economic liberalism. The modern French social security system takes its roots in the 1945 Program of the National Council of the Resistance aimed to consolidate achievements in the field of social security and to repair the economy from the war damage. The Decree serves as a guarantee of social sustenance and dignified pension wage in the case of impossible self-sufficiency. At the same time two types of "welfare state" - Bismarckian and Beveridgian - spread over the continental Europe that influenced further development of the French social system. The German model presumed a number of social guaranties related to employment status, compulsory social contributions of workers, opening of social security and state aid funds adopted by France afterwards. The 1945 social Program was then developed by Pierre Laroque, member of the Cabinet Minister for Work and Social Care, "father" of today's French social security system. The system adopts a number of features of German "welfare state", but then becomes autonomous and specific. Its main provisions are: corporate risk insurance split in four branches: workplace accident, pensions, illness benefits, family benefits; income redistribution; financial autonomy of social security funds; social financing resulting from employers' and employees' membership fees; opening of a universal fund of social protection, notwithstanding the split in several social payment schemes: entrepreneurs, SME owners, "special regimes" for farmers, agriculture workers, artisans, sailors, state officials, miners, railway workers, etc. Today the French social security system, as it was conceded after World War II, undergoes multiple structural crises of solvency, efficiency, legitimacy, especially, in the field of pensions and family benefits. Nevertheless, the French "welfare state" concept remains adaptive to the globalization process and evolving according to the French and international economic and political development cycles.

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