For a long time healthy and socially disabled people have been helped by caritative institutions, primarily religious ones, with only occasional involvement of the state. The problem was raised by the economic revolution in the XIXth century, with particular emphasis on the highly industrialized countries, such as Alsace and Lorraine. The development of public healthcare, as well as the help to socially disabled people in these two areas (particularly in the spinning factories of Mulhouse, the iron works and the coal-mines of Moselle) have undoubtedly come before and lead to the social laws that were promulgated between 1883 and 1889 by Bismark and then in France after 1919.