Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?

Paul Dutton provides much of the answer in his excellent new study of French social policymaking from the First World War to the crystallization of the social security system shortly after 1945. He argues that two decisive innovations in the 1920s and early 1930s laid the foundation for today's system. First, mutual aid societies, rather than a single government-run fund became the primary vehicle for the expansion of social insurance in the interwar years, especially after the passage of the social insurance law of 1930, which required all industrial workers to be members of some kind of insurance fund. Second, big employers, most notably in the Paris metalworking sector, developed family allowances for employees with many children, a device designed to defuse labor militancy and deflate pressures for across-the-board wage hikes. This initiative paved the way to the family allowance law of 1932, which mandated similar schemes throughout French industry, warming the hearts of pro-natalists who were terrified by the specter of demographic decline. Subsequent expansion of the welfare state in the 1930s and 1940s built upon these key decisions by preserving mutualism and enlarging a family allowance system that came increasingly under state control.

Dutton concludes his study with an account of Pierre Laroque's only partially successful effort after the Liberation to make the system more uniform, unified and equitable. As de Gaulle's social policy czar, Laroque discovered how firmly established the interwar foundations of the system had become. Although Laroque's social security ordinance of 1945 brought most industrial workers under the protection of a state-supervised social security fund known as the general regime, workers in several key sectors (mining, railroads, the utilities), along with farmers and most middle-class occupations, preserved the right to stick to their own separate mutualist funds. Family allowances, moreover, remained separated from social security and their oversight remained subject to the influence of pro-natalists and Christian Democrats. Oddly enough, the arcane structure that still remained a feature of system after the 1940s probably made it more feasible politically to expand the system incrementally in the decades that followed, since social insurance and family allowances were regarded as achievements for the middle class at least as much as they were for industrial workers. As Dutton suggests, if the French have clung so fiercely to the welfare state in recent times, they have done so not just because of they benefited from it financially but also because they felt invested in its structure and in the solidaristic values long associated with mutualism and family allowances.

What makes Dutton's book such an important breakthrough is the precision with which he has explored the interest group politics that went into the policy making process he describes. He also does a terrific job analyzing how these policies manifested basic assumptions about gender and class. Although he does little to compare French welfare state building to that of other countries, he tackles the more essential task of tracing foreign influences on the French, namely the inspiration Laroque's team drew from Britain's Beveridge report in 1942, and the huge impact of the Bismarckian system of social insurance that had already been implanted in the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine when the French reacquired them in 1918. Alsatians and Lorrainers, mostly happy to be French again, were nonetheless loath to sacrifice their German insurance system, and this stark political reality put enormous pressure on French leaders in the 1920s to delivery something comparable to the nation as a whole.

Dutton's investigation of interest group lobbying is especially impressive for the way he examines conflicts within the ranks of major groups. The National Federation of Mutual Aid Societies, for example, had long resisted leftwing pressures to bring social insurance under government oversight. But Federation leaders split in the 1920s, as Dutton explains, between die-hard anti-statists and realists who recognized that some kind of major expansion of social insurance was inevitable. Realists then lobbied successfully in parliament to give mutual aid societies a preponderant place in the system that came to be embodied in the law of 1930. Likewise, Dutton shows how deeply divided labor and the Left remained throughout the 1920s on questions of social insurance. Catholic unions were keen to work within the framework of family allowances and mutualism, whereas Socialists in the reformist CGT were more cautious, and Communists regarded social insurance as a trick to bolster capitalism. A Left so divided was poorly equipped to mount an effective campaign for a unified, egalitarian system of social security.

Ironically, labor leaders tended to share common views about one issue, the place of women in French society, that played into the hands of conservatives seeking to shape the family allowance system. Feminists after First World War, especially women in the Communist movement, argued vigorously for equal wages for equal work, but many rank-and-file men and local union leaders supported a return to traditional domestic arrangements. To make matters worse, a number of important feminists were bourgeois moderates with close ties to the very industrialists who were advocating employer-controlled family allowance plans. With working-class ranks divided between men and women, as well as between workers with large families and childless laborers, and with feminists divided by class and ideology, it was difficult to forge a crusade against a family allowance scheme that served to reinforce these very cleavages. As Dutton shows, the architects of the laws of 1930 and 1932 took full advantage of these divisions to create a social insurance and family allowance system that created disincentives for mothers to join the workforce.

Most accounts of the French welfare state pay relatively little attention to the period of the Popular Front (1936–1938). Yet, in an ingeniously argued chapter on the late 1930s, Dutton conveys just how critical it proved to be. Léon Blum's government instigated compulsory arbitration, which in turn made family allowances subject to the rulings of arbitrators. In addition, Blum's agricultural minister, Georges Monnet, obligated the farm sector to take up family allowances. Together these two measures brought chaos: Arbiters altered the allowance schedules to the benefit of workers with just one or two children, hence greatly expanding the system, and farmers rose in revolt against their new obligations. In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Dutton compares three regions (in the northeast, the Paris basin, and the west) to demonstrate that farmer compliance with the family allowance system varied by farm size. Only on large farms, where the distinction between employers and laborers was clear, did the industrial model of the family allowance system make much sense. In Dutton's view, Blum's government inadvertently pursued a policy of “creative destruction” in family policy, a debacle that eventually paved the way to the Family Code of 1939. The Code, conservative though it was in many of its provisions, made the family allowance system more orderly and national in scope and more subject to state, rather than employer, control.

Dutton's concluding chapter offers a lean account of the enlargement and reorganization of social insurance and family allowances during the Vichy regime and the immediate postwar years. His purpose is to convey how firmly implanted the policy framework of the interwar years remained, and in this he succeeds. But in its brevity his analysis of the post-1940 period lacks the detailed forays into interest group politics that make his story of the 1920s and 30s so satisfying to read. Dutton has nonetheless written what is likely to remain for some time to come the premier account of welfare state building in France between the wars and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexity and popularity of the system that emerged after 1945.