Welfare policies in France – a hidden “mixed economy”

Abstract

This short review article has two main goals. On the one hand, to show that beyond an apparent opposition between “big state” and “big society”, the history of French assistance is based more on complementarities and cooperation than on confrontation. As in Anglo-Saxon countries and Germany, it is therefore relevant to speak about a “mixed economy of welfare”, although the term is almost never used. On the other hand, the paper will also try to understand that omission by tracing the outlines of the French historiography on assistance, showing that works on the subject are both relatively recent (mainly from the 1990s onwards) and often scattered across religious and social history from the 19th to the 21st century; but also between historians and other social scientists.