Keywords

Introduction

The year 2003 was the hottest summer on record, with an additional 15,000 extra deaths recorded in France. More than 80% of excess deaths were in people over 75 years old (Grynszpan, 2003, p. 1169). Analyses of the disaster pointed to a strong link between solitude, social exclusion, and death. Toward the end of a fortnight of excessive August temperatures—two-thirds of France’s weather stations reported temperatures in excess of 35 degrees centigrade, while 15 percent registered 40 degrees—as the death toll became apparent, the media reported a breakdown in the country's social cohesion and a failure to protect the most vulnerable in society.

On 26 August 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the heatwave, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin personally interpreted the human catastrophe as symptomatic of a lack of solidarity due to a weakening of the “social fabric” (Ogg, 2005, p. 14). Employing words such as “together,” “we fight,” and “our country,” he called for strengthened solidarity and for the task ahead to be shared between government and citizens; an explicit display of solidarity would need to be organized. He proposed abolishing a public holiday to finance a new pillar of social security aimed at financing retirement homes and care for people who live with disabilities. Employees would work an extra day (in this case a public holiday) but without extra earnings, while employers would contribute employee costs to a special fund. The rationale was that the most active would help the most vulnerable—a “social contract” of one’s day’s duration, imposed by the state. It would be a politically orchestrated extravaganza, similar perhaps to a charity rock concert or telethon. While this idea seemed like a knee-jerk response, it was likely a well-thought-out political initiative—solutions go looking for problems (Kingdon, 1995). Such schemes had been tried in Sweden and in Germany, post-reunification with a “solidarity tax.” The subsequent law of 30 June 2004 gave a legal framework to raise 2 billion Euros, equivalent to one-fifth of the tax credits the state accords in its budget for older people. The money would equip residential homes and provide better risk management, with 800 million Euros allocated for the people who live with disabilities and 1.2 billion Euros for older people (or rather, the state institutions caring for them).

Despite a huge communications campaign budgeted at 3 million Euros, the day was chaotic: some workers stayed at home assuming it a national holiday; some took the day off officially by using an RTT (compensation day for excess time worked; réduction du temps de travail); others worked or at least tried to go in. There were major abstentions in schools and public transportation, but the French government claimed to be satisfied, nonetheless. After three years of confused Solidarity Days, in December 2007, the secretary of state made responsible for evaluating public policy six months earlier, Eric Besson, submitted a report to Prime Minister François Fillon. Deeming the measure “a real success,” he nonetheless proposed three scenarios: firstly, sticking with the idea of an obligatory day of work but shifting it to a new date; secondly, reinstating the public holiday and leaving it open to firms to decide upon their day; or thirdly, keeping “Pentecost Monday” but improving childcare on the day. In February 2008, the minister of work, social relations, and solidarity, Xavier Bertrand, called instead for a day of solidarity à la carte, be it an RTT, two half RTTs, or seven hours throughout the year. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, though no longer in office, later sought to resurrect the day. In July 2011, the Constitutional Court upheld the legal basis for the day, finding that it was in respect of the values of the Republic, despite France's biggest union, the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour; Confédération française démocratique du travail) having argued that it undermined the notion of equality, since retired persons and the self-employed were excluded.

How to Understand the Case?

I was working in France, managing Interreg projects financed by the EU Structural Funds, which aimed at promoting translational cooperation on cross-border sustainable development programs. As such, I wasn’t actively pursuing academic research at the time but would subsequently move to Maastricht to take up a teaching position and join the department of history, and then, political science. My postgraduate training had not really provided me with much training in historical or social and political sciences methods; much I would later learn on the job. Neither did I have a background in sociology or philosophy; my higher education had principally been in modern languages (French and Spanish) with some European integration. Within my French studies, I had taken modules on French management and modern politics, so I had a little background understanding of the French state.

Nonetheless, I was fascinated by the political fallout from the 2003 heatwave, and living in France from 2002, as well as previously studying there, I was conscious of a number of structural and cultural factors that might have contributed to the high death toll, not least the almost sacred nature of the summer vacation in France when the country effectively shuts down. In France, you are either a juilletiste or aoûtien, depending on which month each year you take your holidays. I had witnessed first-hand how large cities emptied out in the summer heat with much of the population (including the political class) at the coast. It meant that those without family, on low incomes, or too frail to travel were left behind, often high up in apartment buildings without elevators.

I collected a lot of material at the time, from magazines and websites, including political cartoons, but it was only once back in academia that I set about trying to seriously analyze the heatwave and its aftermath. My first article (Stephenson, 2009) examined some of the lessons from the heatwave. Political mismanagement had clearly contributed to the death toll with government initially blaming medical services. However, other politico-cultural, societal, and psychological factors have contributed to the failure to protect the most vulnerable citizens. I identified 20 obstacles (“pathogens”) to ensuring effective response in the face of environmental or weather-related threats, distinguishing between state-institutional and individual-community barriers, most of which have a cultural dimension. These factors require greater consideration by policy makers to improve preparedness for environmental threats in the EU. The disaster raised questions about crisis management and how best to reduce risk for older populations, illustrating the limits of the state in offering social protection through institutionalized solidarity mechanisms, and recognizes calls to strengthen community-capacity.

While my first article sought to trace what happened (or didn’t) during the heatwave—focusing largely on political mismanagement and lack of preparedness—my second and third articles (Stephenson, 2013, 2014) sought to explore what happened in the months that followed. In the 2013 article, I looked at the way in which the heatwave was framed in political debate, including inside the French parliament. It examined the impact of the public health crisis on French public management, considering how government actors across various state institutions, including central and decentralized tiers of public administration, engaged in reform. It studied how these actors in the post-crisis reform process established responsibility and drew lessons. It showed that “solidarity” was used discursively in a game of political blame-shifting and experimentation and it pointed to the politics behind the framing of crisis enquiries (Stephenson, 2013). As such, my main conceptual approach to analyzing the case was to look at the discourse within parliamentary debates and to examine speeches by key actors in politics and public health.

What fascinated me most, however, was a fund-raising initiative advocated by the prime minister—a bold political move to cancel a public holiday and, thereafter, the resistance and refusal, chaos, and confusion that ensued in France, arguably the country with the most generous welfare state and healthcare systems in the world. One couldn’t help but be struck by how politicians, including Raffarin, who had been the target of so many accusations of political failure at the time of the heatwave, were now suggesting that the whole country take remedial action to correct previous misdoings—the media had spoken at the time of a lack of inter-generational solidarity. How could one really understand the boldness of this political move? Through what theoretical or conceptual lens might one hope to understand it? How could one conceive of the possible normative justifications for this public policy initiative? One way to approach these questions was to consider the gift-like character of the Solidarity Day.

I was not sure that any of the conceptual tools from political science or public administration could really help me analyze “justifications”; most EU policy analysis I had engaged in thus far was from the perspective of the policy-making cycle and was about doing the detective work to arrive at an evidence-based argument that sought to explain policy outcomes, whether this concerned agenda-setting (who pushed the issue onto the political or media agenda?), decision-making (how can we understand decisions as the result of deliberation and power play?), or implementation (how can we understand sub-optimal policy delivery?). In short, most of my work looked at the role of actors and institutions in advancing their own preferences to drive policy integration. It was interested in identifying the interests and agendas of actors and analyzing how they were advanced.

I could arguably have taken a more systematic approach to analyzing the discourse around the proposal for, and implementation of, the Solidarity Day—perhaps using framing theory (Rein & Schön, 1996) or discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008). Recent work in public administration on experimentalist governance (Sabel & Zeitlin, 2010) conceives of the role of experimentation, deliberation, and informalism as means to social stakeholders and secure consensus on courses of political action. However, I wasn’t really seeking to understand policy implementation, or policy failure in practice, but rather, why there was so much confusion around the event and such diversity in the way different groups and individuals reacted. By extension, I was keen to consider, with regard to the role of the state and political philosophy, how one might possibly justify such a bold (and risky) political experiment. And though Raffarin and his government didn’t necessarily articulate their rationale in such explicit terms, I was intrigued by how one might—from a historical and societal perspective—justify the move?

Despite no real background in socially or anthropology, perhaps a theory that would help explore the relationships between the state, the welfare state, and citizens would help me contemplate the case, to find compelling arguments. The French sociologist Marcel Mauss’ gift theory and public policy together were able to inform my analysis of the response to the introduction of this day, though Mauss’ original work did not put forward a method for operationalizing the gift cycle for public policy analysis.

In the process of formulating my arguments, I “pitched” the story of what happened in France as a moral conundrum to a number of friends and colleagues with different disciplinary backgrounds, including philosophy, social anthropology, and sociology, some of whom were familiar with the work of Mauss. By exploring Mauss’ ideas and seeking to apply his notions to my contemporary case, I was not consciously engaging in interdisciplinary research, but rather embracing a concept that could help me narrate, discuss, and explore actions and motivations by testing the empirical reality against these notions of gift and exchange at a collective level. I sought and succeeded to place my article in a country-oriented journal, Modern and Contemporary France, which is by its very nature a multidisciplinary—though not necessarily interdisciplinary—journal (Stephenson, 2014).

The experience has also made me critically reflect on my own “discipline” of European Studies, arguably really. What constitutes European Studies differs from university to university, but in Maastricht it is heavily oriented to using political science methods, even if, in the broader sense, it is de facto an interdisciplinary “field” that captures political science, history, modern languages, literature, and cultural studies. It is always good to make the distinction between European Studies.

Mauss and the Notions of Gift and Reciprocity

In 1950, Marcel Mauss wrote of a re-emergence of gift as well as the triangle of charity, social service, and solidarity, stating that our lives were permeated with the atmosphere of gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle (Mauss, 1954/1950, 1954/2006). Charity was seen as a free gift—“a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources” (Douglas, 1990/2002, p. ix). Liberty was the absence of all impediments to action, other than physical or mental constraint. The term “free-will” did not infer liberty of will, desire, or inclination, only the liberty of man (Peters, 1956, pp. 167–8). Recently, Aafke Komter (2005) has sought to rethink social ties by bringing together sociological theory on solidarity and anthropological theory on gift exchange, positing that modern theories of solidarity should incorporate core insights from gift theory.

We might consider “gift” to be part of a total system of reciprocity in which the honor of the giver and recipient are engaged. The system is simple: every gift must be returned in some specific way, setting up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations. In some cases, the specified return is of equal value, producing a stable system of statuses. In others, it must exceed the value of the earlier gift, producing an escalating honor contest. The whole society is thus a catalogue of transfers that map obligations between members, a living record of the credit and debt structure of a community. Reciprocity may be seen as the building block of community because it “makes and perpetuates dyadic relationships that are the irreducible core of society” (Gudeman, 2001, p. 80). Solidarity is implicit in the gift:

the state and its subordinate grouping desire to look after the individual. Society is seeking to rediscover a cellular structure for itself. It is indeed wanting to look after the individual. Yet the mental state in which it does so is one in which are curiously intermingled a perception of the rights of the individual and other, purer sentiments: charity, social service, and solidarity. The themes of gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominant motif too long forgotten. (Mauss, 1954/2006, p. 87)

In political philosophy too, reciprocity is one of the key concepts, especially when it comes to thinking about what justice (social and distributive) requires: many theories of (re)distribution are based on the understanding of justice as a certain type of social reciprocity between individuals in society. Enacting reciprocity is a tactical act and “way of groping with uncertainty at the limits of a community: offering a gift defends, secures and expands the borders of community” (Mauss, 1954/2006, p. 87). The theory of gift thus is a theory of human solidarity. A gift should enhance solidarity; a gift that does not is a contradiction.

What is solidaire about the gift is precisely the in-built expectation of reciprocity, contrary to free gift or donation, whereby the donor seeks exemption from any further transaction with the recipient. The gift is thus rarely free in day-to-day life but tied up with notions of self-interest and disinterest (Caillé, 2005). Hillel Steiner’s (2010) theory of rights and freedom considers interactions between individuals in society as a mere series of transactions: he thus conceptualizes freedom as something that can be measured and located on a range within a continuum. Within this framework gifting (giving something that belongs to you freely away to someone) occupies one end of the continuum; exploitation, in contrast, stands at the other. But what do we mean when we talk of solidarity? Emile Durkheim (1984) distinguished between two types: mechanical and organic solidarity. In the case of mechanical solidarity in traditional societies, cohesion and integration come from the homogeneity of individuals whereby people feel connected through similar work, education, religion, and lifestyle (Giddens, 1971).

Applying Mauss to the French Case

In my 2014 article, I set out that Mauss himself would arguably have been fervently opposed to the Solidarity Day, establishing that, as more or less an anti-state anarchist, he would have objected to any form of enforced solidarity, be it via legal and financial channels of the state welfare system. For each hypothesis about gift/reciprocity, there are also constraints in the cycle, that is, there is possibility of pure gift exchange being interfered with or inherently limited due to different factors. We may conceive of multiple motives and competing actor perspectives, when understanding why different parties behaved as they did. How could I better understand the confusion in, and diversity of, public reactions to the proposed Solidarity Day?

First, considering state “gift-giving,” I argued that the French government had sought an act of reciprocation for the generous welfare state. The state was merely seeking reciprocity from the citizenry for its many years of massive gift-giving in terms of welfare protection, having put in place a financial and institutional system of social security mechanisms. Arguably, it was now time for citizens to give explicit recognition of the extensive mechanisms put in place to guarantee their welfare and, in so doing, to acquiesce to the state’s agenda by participating in the fund-raising event. The state was “calling in” a small favor for services rendered, namely to work a day and with no financial consequence—no more and no less money—to help it raise extra tax revenues from firms. The critical problem here was that the state did not seek reciprocation uniformly from all men and women; instead, the tactic was to engage the Republic in an expression of collective solidarity (to raise money and strengthen the social fabric). Yet, the strategy promoted the expression of solidarity through work, enabling those with a job to take part but leaving the unemployed marginalized. It promoted the notion of “active citizenship,” while reinforcing the idea of dependency by older people on the state. Those gainfully employed could formally “express the Republic” while those unable to work were not presented with alternative means to “give.” Paradoxically, social solidarity expressed through everyday support, such as informal and unrecognized social processes, perhaps by volunteers, and which narrows the inter-generational divides, was not recognized. Such day-to-day activity had no visibility or obvious financial contribution to the state. The state’s pursuit of a display of mechanical solidarity promoted inequality and placed individual liberty at risk.

Second, I put forward that the notion of working an extra day was a gift to older people and, as such, an act of reciprocity also, in recognition of the freedom and equality secured through wartime courage and the post-War social struggle of the 1940–1950s. A typical victim of the heatwave, at 80 years old, would have been born in 1923 and aged 16 at the outbreak of World War II. One might consider the economically active French worker had a political (and economic) obligation to express solidarity (fraternité) toward the older people in gratitude for their fighting and resistance which had ensured the worker’s own freedom (liberté). Moreover, the older generation’s political and social struggles in the post-War period had secured greater social, racial, and gender equality, such as with the uprising of 1968. Republican values would have little meaning had the Fifth Republic failed to materialize, for example, if German occupation had endured long-term. The workforce had a political obligation to honor the 15,000 dead, as well as older people, many of whom had been soldiers. Decades later, this was arguably an opportunity to take the gift cycle forward by expressing inter-generational solidarity through work. Workers could exert their free-will precisely because of this gift of brave resilience. At its most fundamental, liberating the Republic had guaranteed the possibility for solidarity to be expressible in 2005.

However, an obvious critique was that older people were not engaged with workers, so extending the gift cycle created impossible burdens. Gift triggers reciprocity and, thereafter, a domino effect of reciprocation, but the theory assumes the ability to reciprocate. Pentecost Monday effectively established a fresh transaction between workers and older people (both dead and alive) who had themselves not sought the intervention of the workforce; the state used them as a scapegoat to coax the economically active into work. Newspaper cartoons I collected at the time featured caricatures of older people, bemoaning ironically, “The young are really going to love us now” or “That was the only day of the year that my son ever visited” (Stephenson, 2009). Older people were effectively newly indebted to the workforce since the healthcare guarantees they had the right to expect from the state were not in place—the financial delivery of welfare was made subject to the actions of the social partners by calling on the Republic. Older people would have to “shoulder” the friction engendered by the possibly disgruntled working population.

Third, I explored the notion that because civil society failed to express solidarity during the heatwave, the state legitimately stepped in to trigger the cycle of gift-giving through forced employment. The supposed breakdown of the “social fabric” in 2003 presented the state with the task of encouraging citizens or “social partners” to take action. Yet, this failure or absence was merely presumed based on a hefty death toll and before any parliamentary enquiry had been conducted and evidence gathered. If indeed political indifference, societal fragmentation, economic imperative, and/or a lack of awareness had prevented appropriate action during the heatwave, then this could now be righted by the state acting as a catalyst for the forwarding of the gift cycle. Moreover, it is the role of the state’s managers (elected politicians) to uphold and promote Republican values. This would keep older people high up the political agenda and in the public consciousness. The state would need to act quickly since the public memory changes and fades.

From a different angle, we might also question if the event itself was a “taking back of gift”—here valuable leisure time—on the premise that citizens had chosen inaction over solidarity in August 2003. Pentecost Monday was thus a punishment, made possible by an assumption that the death toll resided with the failure of the citizen, even if this derived from nothing other than media reporting and political rhetoric. The constraint in this case, however, as regards the application of the gift principle, is that workers could not express gift based on unhindered political obligation or free-will. Political coercion to ensure another’s security constrains one’s own free-will. Solidarity expressed through action must come from an individual’s moral choice and organic solidarity, not coercion by a third party. In the pure gift-reciprocity cycle giving indeed becomes obligation, and by extension, in the political community, membership demands obligation.

In short, if the state’s ultimate goal was to strengthen community, then orchestrating a collective act of solidarity seemed a logical strategy, even if organized to raise money for public expenditure. As Stephen Gudeman (2001, p. 81) asserts, if a gift is freely given, it has no social impact, because obligations are not set into motion. It is precisely the constraint, coercion, obligation—some derived automatically from membership to the community and some coming from purposeful state action—that was meant to encourage citizen action through experimentation with a balanced form of “economic reciprocity,” expressed through services and performances (work). The fund-raising event placed obligations on older people and workers, capturing them within a transactionary cycle. The gift was meant for society at large, the spirit of the gesture had to both strengthen community and act as an expression of the idea of community. We might be tempted to consider the collective action as a form of “solidarity” by consensus. However, it could also be argued that the day could not be solidarity precisely because the prompt came through a form of legislative state act, tantamount to coercion. It seemed that there were constraints in the pure application of both gift and reciprocity, as well as with the subjective nature of what constitutes gift, charity, and obligation. The case highlights the difficulty in repaying gift and the impact of time, between a critical moment of drama and the opportunity to give or reciprocate, on the collective being willing and able to do so.

The first Solidarity Day on Monday, 16 May 2005, and those that followed were a space for political struggle and contestation. The explicit fund-raising initiative was the very visible hand of the state orchestrating and constraining action in the name of older people. This would have appealed to Hobbes’ absolutist, supremely powerful state but arguably have repelled Mauss, who, nonetheless, would have been intrigued how the forces of reciprocity, morality, and obligation came into play. He would probably have believed that any expression of solidarity should be free, organic, and of its own accord, without legal prompting, accepting that freedom and obligation, generosity, and self-interest are all somehow inherent in the gift. As the case showed me—as I tested the application of the gift cycle and gift economy in an exploratory mode—this concept developed in the mid-twentieth century still served as a valuable tool for exploring state-citizen relations today.

Conclusion

Looking back at my analysis using Mauss, I am pleased that I took the leap of faith and engaged with ideas emanating from a discipline beyond my own. That said, because I was early in my academic career and had not received a particularly strong grounding in political science research methods, I can’t say that I was particularly conscious of either stepping outside of “my discipline” or actively engaging in interdisciplinary research. Instead, it felt both liberating and fun to engage with the ideas of a thinker whose work I had not read; and, perhaps, it was the very fact that Mauss was not somebody I was supposed to know, that made the process of engaging with his concept of gift and reciprocity so intellectually appealing. Because I first came to the gift cycle from its use in social anthropology in “exotic” cases of places and people far away, there was something challenging—but at the same time logical—about trying to “reign in” the theory and apply to a modern Western European state and the very country he was from.

There have been more recent heatwaves, floods, and freak weather incidents with drastic impacts on some sections of society and where the political, economic, and societal responses could be analyzed from a similar perspective where governments have taken bold crisis management measures. Moreover, Mauss’ theory has potential application for analyzing more recent cases such as Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. In both cases, there are tremendous questions with regard to inter-generational solidarity. Regarding Brexit, we say a striking contrast in the voting behavior of older versus younger people. Many older, affluent people voted for Brexit, depriving younger people of their EU citizenship and right of free movement, rights that the younger population would arguably make more use of than those whose career is behind them. Older people have enjoyed those rights since 1992. On the one hand, one might argue that the perceived sense of a lack of generational solidarity led the elderly to vote largely for Brexit. On the other hand, one might consider their vote itself as the manifestation of a lack of solidarity. Should votes have been weighted to give more currency to the votes of the economically active, that is, those studying and working for whom the loss of free movement would have greater significance?

In the case of Covid-19, this especially concerns the priority placed in many Western states in 2021 on vaccinating older people over younger people but, in so doing, depriving those who are economically and physically fit of the possibility to travel over the summer. The implications of the pandemic on medical care, economy, and social cohesion raise important questions for social theory about the rights of all citizens, about moral obligation, and, moreover, the limits of the EU’s rights of free movement. Likewise, the introduction of the furlough scheme in the UK to pay workers who were unable to work, thus providing them with a secure income in the short-term, completely transformed notions of Conservative government, the modern state, and social welfare. With massive financial transfers being made to vast swathes of the working population (that regularly pays income tax and national insurance), one could also explore the notion of gift and reciprocity in 2021. Clearly, Mauss’ gift cycle still has enormous currency and potential for further application.