“Fighting the Uncertainty of Tomorrow”: Explaining and Portraying the Social Security System on French Television for Schools

This contribution analyses in detail a series of instructional television programmes for schools produced between the 1950s and the 1980s on national health insurance and the French social welfare system (known as Sécurité sociale). We consider the televisualization of health issues from two alternative perspectives: school television as a type of public health service and access as a matter of social welfare and public health. We investigate how these television programmes, which focus closely on social welfare administration, sought both to educate captive school audiences as future citizens and to shape and form their attitudes towards it.