Bronterre O'Brien's Correspondence with Thomas Allsop: New Evidence on the Decline of a Chartist Leader

Abstract

differences, but also cultural conditioning. The role gerontologists assign to expectations and fears in magnifying health problems for older people has a devastating effect on the majority of the working class. How unique is the French experience? French retirement age is unusually young, which strikes a chord with the old culture of deterioration. The ideological bent of the French labor movement may have contributed to a distinctive approach. So, ironically, may the unusually high percentage of old people in the French population (the result of low birth rates) which caused young workers to push especially hard for a place. But overall the possibility of a similar working-class outlook toward aging seems high, and the possibility is sufficiently gloomy to require historical testing and remedies based thereupon. The time seems particularly propitious for a reassessment, now that French unions have begun to develop programs for dealing with the social needs of the elderly, following from the informal card-playing and reading groups that sprang up by the 1950s; now that French workers as individuals show signs of reconsidering earlier reactions; and now that, since the early 1960s, almost 45% of men over 65 are working at least parttime. Historians of the labor movement and of workers alike can join in this kind of endeavor, for in this area of behavior at least, mutual feedback has been extensive if unproductive. Let us hope that a serious consideration of a dismal but persistent past can allow old people themselves and those who have or should have responsibility for improving the framework of their lives to understand the basic impulse that they must come to grips with. It will certainly point up the need for serious attention beyond a periodic social security calculation of pension costs, in industrial societies where active workers will soon outnumber older workers by barely two to one. Historians, having dutifully followed the labor movement in largely ignoring this subject, must now play an active role in its elucidation.