The article discusses the conditions for the possibility of virtuous alliances between social protection and emancipation, using the path opened by Nancy Fraser (2013). Since the 1970’s, social protection devices introduced by the welfare States to help disabled people have been the object of criticisms. On the one hand, disabled persons movements and the disability studies denounce both their paternalistic foundations, the forms of segregation and oppression that they produce, fueling the dependency and passivity of their beneficiaries. On the other hand, “active social States” of the 1990’s try to restrict access to these devices supposed to encourage people to take advantage of national solidarity and to constitute an obstacle to their self-determination. These two lines of criticism converge to consider forms of protection as forms of alienation; they associate emancipation with the exercise of autonomy and the defence of human rights on the one hand, and with individual accountability on the other. A rereading of empirical work concerning two distinct periods of the French context: the inter-war period, with the emergence of the first collectives of disabled people, and the 1990s, marked by the introduction of activation policies, allow to highlight some kinds of arrangements between public action schemes and local care work, real sources of emancipation, even if they remain fragile.