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This paper suggests that there has been far more change in French labour market policy since the early 1980s than is commonly acknowledged. It suggests that in a new economic and ideational environment the reproduction of the Bismarckian institutions that frame French labour market policy has itself been a vector of gradual but decisive change in the latter's goals and logic. The policies started by compensatory measures in the interests in labour shedding. However, these 'good old recipes' soon provoked untenable cost pressures, eventually resulting in a recalibration of rights to benefit payments. This recalibration was made possible by the introduction of two new kinds of policy instrument in the French labour market policy context, described in section: a minimum income social assistance benefit, and special derogatory employment contracts for particular groups among the unemployed. These instruments introduced new policy logics that have subsequently come to increasingly dominate the policy sector. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]