A first liberal turn in insurance? The Insurance Department and the customisation of motor liability premiums (1960s-1970s)

This paper seeks to explain how the direction des Assurances conceived the price of mandatory car insurance during the sixties and the seventies. In the middle of sixties, the officials of this administration argued that statistics makes it possible to distinguish large classes of insureds according to the risk they represent. For them, there would be a fair price for this insurance for each class of insured. On the other hand, because there are irresponsible drivers, it would be necessary, according to a principle of social justice, to tend towards a personalization of premiums within these equivalence classes. This contribution seeks to demonstrate that this conception is the product of the meeting of two factors in the early 1960s. First, some actuaries and statisticians, who trained in mathematical statistics and econometrics during the inter-war period, criticize the pricing system based on a large pooling of resources. Secondly, for officials, it’s necessary that the policyholders should have reliable information on the prices charged by market players to be held accountable. By reviewing the genesis of this concept and the way in which it was received by the insurance industry, this article highlights the importance of a more detailed analysis of the Trente Glorieuses period by identifying the liberal reform projects that were formalised in the political and administrative arena from the mid-1960s.