Les nouveaux risques de « l’ère de l’opulence » : l’inadaptation et les politiques d’action sociale en France (1945-1969)

In the historiography, the notion of risk has been seen as intrinsically linked to the development of insurance systems. Social assistance policies, by contrast, have uniquely been considered as consisting of an ex post facto response. This article examines the rise in France between the 1940s and 1960s of a discourse seeking to revive social assistance policies on the basis of the notion of rehabilitation. Inspired by existing foreign models, these policies of national solidarity increasingly targeted the psycho-social causes of maladjustment, seen as a common denominator of the various forms of intervention affecting what were changing and very different categories of the population: at-risk families, migrant workers, the inhabitants of shanty-towns, former delinquents and more generally low-income groups. The article shows how increasingly coordinated social action, now directly overseen by the state Department of Health and Population, intertwined an individual and social approach to maladjustment. On the one hand, social action sought to “rehabilitate” the individual by intervening in the medical, functional, psychological and occupational domains and linking up with labor policy and the notion of economic productivity. On the other hand, social maladjustment was increasingly described as a form of inter-generational risk jeopardizing the integration of marginal groups within the social and economic system. The article explains how the use of statistics to identify at-risk social situations and the refusal to ascribe blame for their maladjustment to those concerned led to the establishment of policies of global social action that targeted less their beneficiaries than they did the latter’s living environments and participation in public life. The notion of maladjustment thus became a reference point in a population-management and “social risk” policy linked to economic growth that sought to employ welfare and social services to correct what were seen as socio-cultural living conditions detrimental to the citizen’s personal and social well-being.