Historians in France gave little attention to old age and population ageing during the first half of the 20th century, and the many studies of social scientists from the 1960s had different objectives and methods. In this book, Élise Feller has taken up the challenge, first articulated by Peter Laslett, of writing a history of old age and older people for a period, the first 60 years of the last century, that was one of radical societal transformations. During these decades, she argues, ‘age issues’ were at the core of French social history, framed as they were by rapid change in the material circumstances of the population, notably the beginnings of social security, successive economic crises, the wartime occupation, and the political and economic upheavals following the Second World War. Feller deftly analyses changes in the family, the culture, institutions, attitudes about life and death, and the societal constructions of older people. She vividly portrays radical transformations in the representations of older people, and in the circumstances of the older people that resulted from the introduction of compulsory assistance for the indigent elderly, and later of entitlements to retirement pensions.

Feller first emphasises that the ageing of the French population was well established during the 19th century, with the strongest contributory process being the fall in birth numbers or fertility (average adult life expectancy hardly increased before the 1960s). Following the nation's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, the ageing of the population and the rising number of older people came to be associated in France with every societal ill. The demographer Hervé Le Bras described the prevalent ‘climate of opinion’ as ‘the French neurosis’, which saw societal ageing as a menace, a harbinger of increasing decrepitude, and of a ‘sclerotic’ nation.

The second section of this compelling book describes ‘the long sleep of geriatric medicine’, the failure of formal medicine to engage with the diseases and disorders of old age – astonishing given that the French physician, Jean-Martin Charcot (1828–1893), dedicated himself to understanding these conditions. An excellent chapter provides a balanced account of l'hospice des vieux (residential institutions for elderly people). Sick, weak and rejected older people were dispatched to these institutions, which until around 1960 were settings of the utmost frugality. They provided no more than mediocre social care and medical treatment, and generally affronted the residents' individuality, privacy and dignity. Many were over-crowded and had rates of mortality that shocked observers, yet they also manifested ‘republican solidarity’, having been provided by the nation for the citizens who had come to old age but were unable to live independently during their last months and years. The number of these homes multiplied, their facilities improved, and for a time there was hope that they would provide decent and appropriate accommodation for older people, but they were overloaded by older people from a different social group, destitute middle-class people ruined by the stock-market collapse and inflation of the 1920s.

As ever, the majority of older people wished to stay in their own homes near to their relatives and children (if they had families at all). Before 1945, France was still a predominantly rural society, but family networks were weakened by low fertility and the exodus from rural areas to the rapidly growing principal cities, particularly after the two World Wars. The prevailing view then was that ‘the family’ was in inexorable decline; unexpectedly, however, new forms of familial solidarity emerged (pp. 158–70). The third section of Feller's monograph examines the social constructions of old age and older people, with careful attention to the relationship between the private sphere and collective constructions. A 1905 statute instituted state support for the most impoverished older people, those without savings or a supportive family, two-thirds of whom were living in residential institutions. The policy affirmed the social debt to every citizen that the Republic recognised. In 1936, 450,000 older people received the meagre benefits granted to the poor, among them many redundant and unemployed older workers.

What of the retired? In 1900, only 10 per cent of workers contributed to a pension fund. Legislation in 1910 made it mandatory for those with salaries (however petits) to subscribe to such a fund until they were 65-years-of-age, which was unpopular and poorly implemented (the arrangement became known as ‘retirement for the dead’). Beginning in the 1920s, ‘decisive retirement measures’ were gradually put in place. They were influenced partly by the French state model of public-servants' retirement pensions, and partly by the exceptional retirement funds for ‘special’ occupations (viz. miners and railwaymen). From these beginnings, legislation during 1928–30 set up a complex and inequitable system, funded by voluntary savings, mutual assurance schemes, employer-managed pensions' funds, and state social-insurance. Even if the system was inadequate, never before had older people experienced and been aware of such rapid and profound changes in their material and moral circumstances. The retired population grew strongly during the 1920s, and in 1938 the Popular Front announced the goal of a national retirement scheme, which was achieved in 1941 (Allocation aux Vieux Travailleurs Salariés) and consolidated in 1944 with the inception of the state pay-as-you-go social-security pension (Feller Reference Feller2005). In 1948, 65 per cent of those aged 65 or more years benefited from retirement income, although for many it was modest. A stereotype of the retired became the new ‘image’ of older people.

During the first half of the century, as Feller's account makes clear, the French came to expect a period of retirement after their working years, albeit less well resourced and of course shorter than today. Neither historians nor sociologists have adequately studied this change. Feller presents a chapter on the role of the Parisian transport employees who retired between 1920 and 1940 (pp. 301–43). She describes the careers and lifecourses of this cohort and their dependants and wives, and also the ways in which they gained rights to pensions and reversionary pensions. The author characterises this population, and traces the biographies of the employees and their spouses: their careers, health, longevity, widowhood, family relations, and moves out of Greater Paris (which 60 per cent undertook), many returning to their place of birth.

For the breadth of its perspectives, the seriousness and subtlety of its analyses, this book makes a substantial contribution to gerontology. It situates the individual's private situations and the social constructions of older people in the development of European societies during the first six decades of the 20th century. The book's perspectives are, according to Peter Laslett's expression, ‘on the side of older people’ – not least reflecting the lives of the more numerous older women – and make a well-crafted and original contribution to women's social history.