ABSTRACT
Since the creation of the National Social Security system in 1945, the core of French social rights – meaning the rights of individuals to particular benefits, allowances and services in cases of need – has been guaranteed through contributory social security schemes. The French social security programme was designed as a “general regime” aiming to cover the population through a system of social insurances. As this chapter will demonstrate, this system of social insurances has been theoretically anchored in the notion or paradigm of social risks, which assumes that the legislation defines those risks or, at least, names them by recognizing different branches of the Social Security system, according to the model of the International Labour Organisation’s Social Security (minimum standards) Convention no 102, (ILO 1952). Ideally speaking, the Social Security system was expected to create a new social
order in which people – and not only workers – would be entitled to solid rights and thus become truly emancipated. In this vision, social assistance schemes and means-tested rights would only play a residual part. This was the view of the founders of the 1945 social security plan. Unfortunately, this ideal goal was never totally achieved. The social security schemes based on “socio-professional” solidarities and organized in the sphere of employment failed to cover the whole population, meaning that the ancient social assistance techniques had to be redesigned and modernized in order to cover the “interstitial population”. Moreover, with deindustrialization and some other societal factors such as ageing, new kinds of social risks appeared: especially social exclusion and loss of autonomy in elderly people. Those new social risks are heavily challenging the traditional French welfare system. Obviously, the challenge is a financial one and the political debate about social
exclusion and ageing in our society mainly reflects this aspect: how can the French economy sustain the burden of the “new poverty” and of long-term care policies for an ageing population? But what is also challenged is the French path of social rights: how far, and with which concepts and techniques, can the French welfare system extend itself to encompass those “new social risks”, and what kind of “new” social rights are supposed to be recognized and implemented?
