Aging in France: Population Trends, Policy Issues, and Research Institutions

Like in other advanced industrial countries, in France, demographic aging has become a widely debated research and policy topic. This article offers a brief overview of major aging-related trends in France. The article describes France's demographics of aging, explores key policy matters, maps the institutional field of French social gerontology research, and, finally, points to several emerging issues about aging. In France, these issues include active and healthy aging, the improvement of knowledge on specific vulnerable segments of the elderly population, and the adaptation of the urban landscape and infrastructure to an aging population. At the broadest level, one of the key points formulated in this article is that in France, aging research is dominated by the state, yet it is scattered and compartmentalized, posing a crucial challenge in an era dominated by European and other international networks and coordination efforts in aging policy and knowledge.