Socialism, the new radical doctrine after 1815, began in France. Early French socialists shared a sense of disappointment in the outcome of the French Revolution. They were also alarmed by the rise of laissez faire and the emergence of modern industry, which they saw as fostering inequality and selfish individualism. There was, they believed, an urgent need for a further reorganization of society to establish cooperation and a new sense of community.

Early French socialists felt an intense desire to help the poor, and they preached greater economic equality between the rich and the poor. Inspired by the economic planning implemented in revolutionary France (see Chapter 22), they argued that the government should rationally organize the economy to control prices and prevent unemployment. Socialists also believed that government should regulate private property or that private property should be abolished and replaced by state or community ownership.

Up to the 1840s France was the center of socialism, as it had been the center of revolution in Europe, but in the following decades the German intellectual Karl Marx (1818–1883) would weave the diffuse strands of social thought into a distinctly modern ideology. In 1848 the thirty-year-old Karl Marx and the twenty-eight-year-old Friedrich Engels (see “Responses to Industrialization” in Chapter 23) published The Communist Manifesto, which became the guiding text of socialism.

Marx argued that middle-class interests and those of the industrial working class were inevitably opposed to each other. According to the Manifesto, the “history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles.” In Marx’s view, one class had always exploited the other, and, with the advent of modern industry, society was split more clearly than ever before: between the middle class — the bourgeoisie — and the modern working class — the proletariat.

Just as the bourgeoisie had triumphed over the feudal aristocracy in the French Revolution, Marx predicted that the proletariat would conquer the bourgeoisie in a new revolution. While a tiny majority owned the means of production and grew richer, the ever-poorer proletariat was constantly growing in size and in class-consciousness. Marx believed that the critical moment when class conflict would result in revolution was very near.