After the failure of the General Welfare Agency, drafted by the French Revolution in 1791-1793, mandatory systems of social protection gradually appeared. Despite their faults and insufficiencies, they were forerunners of the social security system. During the nineteenth century, the schemes for invalids of the royal navy under Louis XIV, and for the actors at the Comédie française, paved the way for the development of other individual schemes for civil servants, railway workers, and miners, for example. At the end of the nineteenth century, France adopted broader welfare laws, rather than Bismarck type social insurance, thus allowing individual prudential schemes much room to develop. After years of resistance or hesitation, the parliamentary debates about individual liabilities, social rights to welfare or to social insurance, obligation, and solidarity finally resulted in the 1898 Work Injury Act, the 1910 Pensions Act, the 1928-1930 Social Insurance Acts and the 1932 Family Benefits Act. The locus of conflict between social forces in this field shifted towards questions about the power of management and about how to finance private medicine.