The Transition to Retirement.

Summary The draft reform of the French pension system, unveiled last July, should replace the notions of legal retirement age by a pivotal age, evolving according to the life expectancy of the generations. We have already seen to what extent this question of the retirement age was the subject of strong positions, reflecting the symbolic importance of this transition in our society. However, the economic literature highlights both negative and positive impacts of retirement, depending on the national context and the situation of the people concerned. This ambivalence about retirement is reflected in subjective evaluations of well-being. Moreover, retirement does little or nothing to erase social differences in the evaluation of one's well-being: those who are most satisfied before retirement are also most satisfied after retirement, even if in certain areas, particularly health, the gap between social groups tends to narrow with the passage to retirement. Because of the place occupied by work in the construction of people's social position, retirement can also be a time for questioning their social usefulness, when certain work-related sociability ties become weakened. We observe such effects in the French case, but they remain weak for people under 70, and even weaker if, like a third of retirees in this age group, the person is involved in volunteer activities. Painful questions about social usefulness or feelings of loneliness are more of a problem in the fourth age, from 80 onwards.