Lois et expériences dans l’entre-deux-guerres, des invalides aux handicapés

Abstract

The laws adopted in France in favour of war-disabled people following the First World War have significantly changed the social assistance frameworks and the possible situations for disabled people. By allowing war-disabled persons to work if they choose to do so while receiving an inalienable pension, and also by relying on new disability assessment grids as functional damages, these laws have opened up new spaces of freedom and unprecedented criticism for the disabled people. More than a global change in the treatment, social representations or trajectories of these, because innovations remain scattered, fragile and variable, it's the creation of a new framework and a new space of possibilities that is witnessed during the interwar period: the disability in the strict sense of the word. We would like to sketch it out here. The new laws are the main conditions of possibility of this; it extends between the two World Wars from the exceptional status of Veterans to the claim of equality of right to all the disabled; it's expressed in rare but shared and repeated experiences, formulated by the mutilated Veterans and then the civilian invalids.