It’s seventy years since France introduced major social security laws. Daniel Nethery was there for the celebration

“Social security has irreversibly changed our country,” declared Marisol Touraine, minister for social security and women’s rights, as she opened the official celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the French system. Around a thousand of us had queued in the rain outside the historic Maison de la Mutualité, in the Latin Quarter in Paris, to commemorate two October 1945 pieces of legislation that set in place France’s postwar social security system. Those reforms, Touraine suggested, were the mark of a country that had become “lucid regarding the causes of its collapse,” and the social security system could rightly take the credit for allowing France to maintain a “robust” birthrate today of (just) over two children per female.