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This article offers a social and historical overview of a half-century of social care of the elderly. The author discusses how the current period seems to reflect the end of a cycle. In the second half of the twentieth century, policies were mainly carried out by the social and medical-social public service sector—that is, municipalities, charities, and social insurance funds—who, supported by the state, responded to the needs of the new population of the “retired and elderly.” The appearance of “dependency” as a policy issue in the 1980s produced a shockwave, and introduced geriatricians as new actors who modified aging policy. But the gradual disappearance of the main actors and organizations that had consolidated social gerontology during the 2000s has left a vacuum, which new actors concerned by the question of aging can occupy.