Résumé
This paper seeks to show how the long term financing of social spending has influenced the structure of economic growth. Since the early nineteenth century, French social spendings have periodically increased as elements of the overcoming of economic crisis. The construction of a historical synthetic indicator called index of social infrastructure for human development (ISIDH) allows us to show that social spendings have become structural components of economic growth. The analysis of the funding of ISIDH signals a common pattern of evolution of its different components: social spendings tend to become more driven by productive concerns than by redistributee issues.