By the belle époque, much of Europe’s bourgeoisie had become clients of the continent’s growing transnational life insurance industry. Private joint-stock companies sold male heads of household the peace of mind that came with an assured source of income for heirs and family members, investing the premiums in state bonds, real estate, and other securities.
In the aftermath of the First World War, in which governments had sought to fully mobilise their populations, financial systems, and economies, purveyors of this bourgeois savings instrument par excellence fought to maintain their industry’s relevance by penetrating new markets among the lower classes, promoting their businesses through alignment with new state welfare initiatives, and offering their services as nationally loyal but internationally savvy financial intermediaries. In Italy and Germany, as nationalist movements pursued a new form of perpetual political mobilization, large insurance concerns joined forces with them to liquidate their industry’s competition amongst mutual aid societies, self-managed labor union funds, and smaller private firms, creating a centralized, capillary network of low-income customers, and channeling their premiums into long-term investment in state-approved sectors. As the German rearmament and Italian autarchy campaigns accelerated, providers of industrial life insurance – Volksversicherung and assicurazioni popolari, as the policies were known -- saw their holdings expand enormously, increasing their market-share by a factor of three relative to traditional providers and to the banking sector.
Using original research in corporate and state archives, I argue that the insurance sector played a hitherto underestimated role in the social politics and political economies of both countries. In Germany and Italy, state social insurance was inadequate to support individuals or their families and the insurance policies themselves met an important need as a source of retirement income. Nevertheless, the manner in which this need was met – a financialized savings product, linked to preferentially higher male wages and paid out to female beneficiaries, with bonuses for larger families --reinforced the social politics of the regimes’ desired gender division of labor. Through direct agreements with industrial employers, or in cooperation with rural state taxation initiatives, insurers even circumvented the need to sell directly to their low-income clientele, imposing a de facto or de jure obligation based on their employment status. Conditioning social relief on direct contributions to state goals of insurgent industrial and demographic development and securing a marginally greater share of labor income for capital investment, the new life insurance sector, born of institutional competition amongst private and parastatal actors, constituted a vital node in the social fabric and economic structure of German and Italian industrial society.