In 1910, Parliament adopted a first law on retirement “at 65” and by “funding”, which opposed the reformist left of Jean Jaurès to the CGT, in a distant echo of the current reform, examined from Tuesday at the Senate.
Swept away by the Great War and inflation, the 1910 text for workers’ and peasants’ pensions (ROP) is largely forgotten today, but it constitutes the “first compulsory social insurance law”, underlines political scientist Gilles Pollet.
Because France had so far limited itself to categorical reforms – a retirement for civil servants in 1853, miners in 1894 or railway workers in 1890 and 1909 – when neighboring Germany established a more comprehensive system of social protection.
On the French side, in a parliamentary Third Republic, the debate took twenty years to settle, after a first draft tabled in 1890.
The heart of the reform is prepared by secular radicals like Léon Bourgeois, members of Freemasonry and militants of solidarism, a doctrine of mutual insurance where everyone pays their debt to society.
Under the government of Aristide Briand (left and center), the text of 1910 sets a normal retirement at 65 by capitalization after thirty years of payment in companies under the authority of the boss. It is based on tripartite funding: contributions from the employer (nine francs per year), from the employee (nine francs) and a state allowance from retirement (sixty francs annually). To achieve a modest pension of 60 to 360 francs per year.
The Chamber of Deputies hoped for a more ambitious reform, with a departure set at 60, but it had to find a compromise with the Senate, when the two assemblies were at the time on an equal footing.
At the podium, the socialist deputies Jean Jaurès and Édouard Vaillant support the reform, to replace the “old charity” family and “alms” by “insurance”.
“Jaurès knew the law was imperfect, with sums that did not allow independent living, but for him it is a new right”, a “principle”, says his biographer Gilles Candar. The threshold of 65 years will be lowered to 60 years in 1912.
Socialist too, Jules Guesde fights on his side the law, a “deduction on wages”.
“I, a socialist, would put my signature at the bottom of this reduction? No, no, it’s impossible”, he launched to the deputies on March 31, 1910.
On the union side, the CGT has been campaigning for years against this “retirement for the dead”, obtained at an age that many workers will never reach, especially in the most difficult industries such as glassmaking. In 1910, life expectancy was about 50 years.
The revolutionary union is fighting a levy on already meager wages and capitalization, associated with the stranglehold of the boss. Another grievance, the establishment of a system of contribution slips and stamps which awakens the painful memory of the “worker’s book” under the Empire, by which the authorities controlled the movements of the workers.
The CGT calls to boycott the law and the workers not to pay the contribution. And justice will break the obligation of contribution at the end of 1911.
Under such conditions, the law will be difficult to apply, even if a million people received this ROP pension on the eve of the war.
“In each village, people will know someone who is retired”, it is an “education in foresight”, estimates Gilles Pollet.
Today, the clashes around the reform of the government of Elisabeth Borne awaken the distant memory of 1910: several deputies have taken up the slogan “retirement for the dead” to oppose the postponement of the legal age from 62 to 64 years old.
But “if the debates were eventful in this very parliamentary Third Republic, they seemed of better quality at the time. While we have just witnessed a debate that is mainly tactical in the Assembly and little on the merits”, considers M Pollet, before arriving in the Senate, in committee from Tuesday.
02/24/2023 13:50:35 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP