Tribune. We should not forget that the mutualist movement played an essential role in the long gestation which led to the establishment of social security at the Liberation. The first “mutual aid societies”, which saw the light of day around 1830, organized wage struggles and paid for sickness and funerals. Napoleon III strengthens them, but eradicates their protest dimension by organizing them on the geographical basis of the municipality and no longer on the trade.
From then on, the French social movement split between trade unionists, who will organize demands (wages, working conditions), and mutualists, who will manage illness and, to a lesser extent, pensions. There is no such gap in the rest of Europe, where unions assume both roles at the same time. Often run by notables until 1914, mutual societies then brought together 4 million members, ten times more than unions!
The principle of solidarity-based social protection was born in dangerous professions: sailors under Louis XIV, then soldiers under Napoleon Ier. With the industrial revolution followed, in the XIXe century, miners, railway workers, gas electricians and civil servants. These special schemes, which will continue to this day, only cover a small part of the population: at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, there is no general system of social protection.
The development of industrialization and the increase in the number of workers are raising awareness of the need to extend social protection. In 1910 a law was passed establishing “workers’ and peasant pensions” (ROP), which would cover 3.5 million people in 1914. ROP broke with the territorial anchoring of mutuality, by affirming the primacy of the contractual link over the attachment to the municipality. The principle of compulsory insurance therefore scores points. At first reluctant in the face of a law that calls into question their conception of free and voluntary social protection, the mutualists end up resigning themselves to it.
Laborious negotiations
In the aftermath of the Great War, social protection was rethought, giving an increased role to the State. The return to France of the three departments of Alsace-Moselle, beneficiaries of social insurance (AS) set up in Germany in the 1880s, implies an adaptation of this system to France, the last major country in Europe to adopt a compulsory system. At the end of laborious negotiations between the mutualist movement, unions and employers, and an agreement with liberal medicine, the AS covered 8 million people at their beginnings in 1930 and 15 million at the Liberation.
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