The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of great change for Europe. Many revolutions, reformations, and advances took place, shaping Europe into what we know it as today. Industrialization changed the lives of many, and the revolution that followed it changed many more. Europe became the modernized place that it is today because of the late nineteenth century, especially because of events like the Industrial Revolution that changed the lives of the lower and middle classes immensely.
The pictures above show these changes that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. Figure one depicts people all sitting together in a small space. The clothing and sad expressions on the forward most people indicate that they are poor. These type of people were the lower class people of Europe, and they went through lots of suffering and difficulty because of this. The painter of the picture was mostly likely one of these lower class people himself. The expressions on their faces show what these people truly must have felt. They are being excluded from the the rest of the people, who seem to be of a higher status. They all are wearing top hats and look more trimmed and well kept, and they also seem to be giving the low class people derogatory looks. During the Industrial Revolution, these lower class people had a very hard time. They were forced by hunger and responsibility to their families to work in dirty, unhealthy factories for long hours and low wages. Workers began to think that this was unfair, but because they were so poor they depended on their jobs. They had no other way to get money, and their family needed it. So the poor people, or proletariat, needed the factory owners.
The factory owners, who were a class above the proletariat, were called the bourgeois. They were not struggling at all like the proletariat were; they made plenty of profit. They payed the workers just enough money for them to live, but not enough money for them to rise up and succeed in life. They suppressed them. Figure two depicts members of the bourgeois strolling happily around an industrialized European city. They don't seem to have a care in the world, and this is most likely because it was painted by a member of the bourgeois. While the bourgeois were out making profits and cheating their workers, the proletariat were still in the factories, working to just barely survive. Unfair treatment like this is what made people like Marx spring into action.
Karl Marx was a socialist. In fact, he created his own type of socialism: Marxism. He worked for the equal rights of workers, and believed that they could, and should, overthrow the bourgeois. Another of Marx's ideas was that prices of goods should be determined by how long they took to produce and the amount of labor involved. Marx wrote pamphlets like das Capital, and he also wrote his Manifesto, which influenced the proletariat very much. Marx led people to realize that they could change what was happening to them; they did not have to undergo this unfair treatment.
The proletariat finally succeeded after following Marx's direction. The poorer people shown in Figure one became the people shown in Figure two. Laws were passed about fairer wages and amounts of hours which workers were permitted to work, and life became a lot easier for these people. With some aggravation and and determination and a bit of revolution, anything is possible, as these proletariat show.
