Aging and the Welfare-state Crisis

Anne-Marie Guillemard is one of France's foremost authorities on aging and social policy, and this English-language edition of her sociohistorical study of postwar French welfare policy carries serious scholarly weight — enough that Alain Touraine and Manuel Castells wrote the preface. The book traces how France built, challenged, and began to dismantle old-age policy under demographic and economic pressure, and argues for new forms of intergenerational solidarity. It is cited across gerontology and comparative social policy literature. The honest caveats are two: the French focus limits direct applicability to other welfare-state contexts, and translation from the French may compress some nuance. Dense academic prose also keeps this firmly in the hands of researchers and policy professionals rather than general readers.