Family mutual support in multigenerational France. Social classes, generations and gender: memberships in question

The lengthening of life expectancy and the ageing of the population in France and more generally in Europe can be seen as an essential motor of the changes in the family over recent decades, especially in the relationships among its generations. They constitute a tool by which its capacities, the new social responsibilities it faces, but also its limits, can be analysed. Based on the recent data from the European SHARE survey, the chapter analyses the dynamics of the relations of familial mutual assistance between generations, in terms of financial transfers and material services. By bringing to light the social characteristics of the ‘helpers’ and the ‘beneficiaries’, it shows that they some periods of the life cycle that are more conducive to supplying assistance than receiving it and that in spite of their low frequency, familial exchanges consecrate the predominance of the link of direct filiation (parents-children). From this standpoint, the challenge that French society will face in the years to come is not so much the ageing of its population as such (and its economic translation in terms of the active/non-active ratio) as the dynamics of the mutual assistance among its familial generations, in a context of social prevarication of the conditions in which the new generations of the elderly will embark on their period of retirement and extended old age, which breaks with a historical cycle of social progress.