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The question of how French society should treat its elderly who lives with mental illness has remained important throughout the 20th century. By focusing on the 1950s, when the fate of the elderly population first became a policy issue for the French welfare State, this article shall endeavor to shed new light on the subject. Thanks to microanalysis and a sociological approach to public policy instruments, this article shall examine one institutional arrangement established in July 1956 within the Seine prefecture. The arrangement encouraged the transfer of elderly patients interned in the prefecture’s psychiatric hospitals to a retirement home situated in Villers-Cotterêts. By studying how this arrangement was implemented, including the discussions amongst the care institutions involved, the impact of the initiative on transferred individuals and, more broadly, the logistical difficulties raised by this administrative workaround, this article establishes a dialogue between respective histories of public policy, psychiatry and elderliness. It thereby better describes the challenges of caring for a population which has long been neglected by the welfare State and which has moreover rarely been examined by historians.