More than forty years ago, one of the toughest myths in the French imagination was born. During the 1981 presidential campaign, candidate François Mitterrand promised to lower the retirement age from 65 to 60 in order to engage France in “the battle for the time to live” which he later theorized during his first five-year term. As promised and due, the reform was implemented in 1982 under the radar of demography, in defiance of public finances and against the tide of all other countries.
We continue to pay dearly for this decision, by an employment rate of seniors which has collapsed so much that it is struggling to return to the levels of the 1970s, by a pension system that has become insensitive to the immense gains in longevity, by its continuous deficits cowardly bequeathed in debt to our children, by a legal age so early and ideologized that it slows down our adaptation to an inverted age pyramid.
We retire earlier than our neighbors even though we live longer than them and with better pensions. And all this without having the means.
Brandi as a “social achievement”
The myth of turning 60 continues to permeate the French today, including the youngest of our compatriots. The Aging France Barometer, which we have just published with the Landoy Club (Bayard group) and Ifop, reveals that the French aspire to retire at 59.8 years old on average. Mitterrand greets us kindly.
While the horizon of existence has since lengthened like never before, careers have diversified, and we have gained ten years of healthy life expectancy over the last fifty years, the myth of 60 years does not seem to have changed one iota in mentalities.
Resisting the passage of time and the changing demographics, it continues to be summoned at each attempt at reform where it is falsely brandished as a “social achievement” to oppose any increase in the legal retirement age. It also continues to dramatize our entire public conversation as has once again been proven by the release of the latest report from the Retirement Orientation Council (COR).
The debate focused on a line that was lost in the middle of 260 pages and which was not even a recommendation but an observation: not affecting contribution levels or pension levels “would imply increasing the average retirement age to 64.2 years in 2030, 65.6 years in 2045 and 67.6 years in 2070”.
The power of the myth is also electoral, with any candidate worthy of the name being asked to position themselves in relation to it by deciding on “their” proposed retirement age to the detriment of everything else, notably the level of pensions and contributions which nevertheless deserve to be called into question.
Retirement as a binary switch
The focus on a legal starting age is more than ever out of step with the abundant reality of millions of French people who are so many individualities, careers and desires impossible to aggregate into a single and uniform deadline sold as a common finish line.
The perversity of the Mitterrandian myth of 60 years also lies in its conception of a retirement in the form of a switch. It is not said enough to what extent the sudden transition from an economically active life on Friday to an inactive existence the following Monday can cause a dramatic blackout with a sudden feeling of uselessness, loneliness and isolation.
How many French people have been fooled by impatiently waiting for this famous time to live only to realize, too late, that work is also health and life?
Retirement should not be a binary switch, it corresponds neither to the essence of life nor to the aspirations of our compatriots who prefer a more gradual, more flexible and even later transition to retirement if the previous conditions are met.
The figures force us to change our outlook
In the same barometer cited previously, 69% of French people say they are ready to work longer “if the legal retirement age were pushed back beyond 64” (the wording is important), provided they benefit from end-of-career adjustments in terms of hours, pace and work; 66% accept this prospect via gradual retirement and 64% via part-time work.
These figures are unprecedented and not negligible. They must challenge us. Far from the big speeches and sterile debates on a single age, they force us to change our outlook to rethink the transition to retirement as a dimmer rather than a switch.
The battle for the time to live must become the battle for the time to choose. Choose your own horizon and your own speed of transition between work and retirement, with flexibility and without forgetting the responsibility to fairly share the demographic bill between ages. With this change of perspective, the myth of 60 years will fall by itself like a ripe fruit. Finally !
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