Labor Welfare in France: A Matter of Citizenship

Abstract

Whether the French Revolution of 1789 led to a victory of the bourgeoisie or the peasantry is debatable, but it did, unquestionably, mandate that the collective good should supersede individual desire. Given this history and the context of French political culture, this article traces the evolution of the relationship between France's labor unions and the country's social workers, largely in the shadow of a powerful centralized welfare state and its network of regional Bourses du Travail. Propositions that date from the Enlightenment—the belief in the mind, the depth of secular humanism, the sway of social activism—mean that workplace social services have been valued more as an idea than as a practice to date, but that the practice currently is growing.

KEYWORDS:

• French workers
• labor unions
• social welfare

Notes

This, and all French–English translations in the article, including the interviews, are by the author.