A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State - Softcover

"This is an extremely useful analysis for anyone interested not only in French social welfare, but also in the history of the parapolitical sphere, associational life among France's elite, and the shifting boundaries between public and private. . . . Horne has done an excellent job of widening the scope of social welfare history, giving us all a whole new range of actors and issues to contemplate." -- Steve M. Beaudoin * Journal of Social History * "Horne's excellent book is a welcome addition to a growing body of historical works on the late nineteenth-century origins of the French welfare state." -- Joshua Cole * Social History * "[An] accomplished book." -- Elizabeth Sage * Journal of Modern History * "[An] elegantly presented book . . . . " -- Maurice Larkin * Times Literary Supplement * "This book is far more than the history of a single institution. It is also a thoughtful examination of political ideology and social discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an important and convincing argument about the origins of social policy in the Third Republic."-Don Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Janet Horne's book provides not only an excellent history of the Musee Social but also an important new perspective on the activities of turn-of-the-twentieth-century reform networks. It demonstrates that the Musee Social constituted a unique French institution, free from Jacobin, centralizing pressures,where experts, intellectuals, and administrators could interact among themselves. Her work reveals the misunderstood but essential role played by independent reformers in the modernization of France."-Pierre Rosanvallon, directeur d'etudes a l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales "Horne's excellent book is a welcome addition to a growing body of historical works on the late nineteenth-century origins of the French welfare state." - Joshua Cole, Social History "[An] accomplished book." - Elizabeth Sage, Journal of Modern History "This is an extremely useful analysis for anyone interested not only in French social welfare, but also in the history of the parapolitical sphere, associational life among France's elite, and the shifting boundaries between public and private. . . . Horne has done an excellent job of widening the scope of social welfare history, giving us all a whole new range of actors and issues to contemplate." - Steve M. Beaudoin, Journal of Social History "[An] elegantly presented book . . . . " - Maurice Larkin, Times Literary Supplement

As a nineteenth-century think tank that sought answers to France's pressing "social question," the Musee Social reached across political lines to forge a reformist alliance founded on an optimistic faith in social science. In A Social Laboratory for Modern France Janet R. Horne presents the story of this institution, offering a nuanced explanation of how, despite centuries of deep ideological division, the French came to agree on the basic premises of their welfare state. Horne explains how Musee founders believed-and convinced others to believe-that the Third Republic would carry out the social mission of the French Revolution and create a new social contract for modern France, one based on the rights of citizenship and that assumed collective responsibility for the victims of social change. Challenging the persistent notion of the Third Republic as the stagnant backwater of European social reform, Horne instead depicts the intellectually sophisticated and progressive political culture of a generation that laid the groundwork for the rise of a hybrid welfare system, characterized by a partnership between private agencies and government. With a focus on the cultural origins of turn-of-the-century thought-including religion, republicanism, liberalism, solidarism, and early sociology-A Social Laboratory for Modern France demonstrates how French reformers grappled with social problems that are still of the utmost relevance today and how they initiated a process that gave the welfare state the task of achieving social cohesion within an industrializing republic.