The increase in industrial production with its emphasis on new patterns of consumption, urban growth, and social class changes virtually obliterated the last vestiges of the old world order and resulted in an emerging mass society after 1870. This new environment incorporated tens of millions of people into the economic changes that Industrial Revolution had wrought. The scope and scale of society expanded to include new perceptions about class distinctions, redefined concepts about work and leisure time, increased political participation by the lower classes, and new expectations about standards of living.
The rising population fueled much of the change. In 1850 Europe’s population stood at 270 million. In 1910 that number had swelled to 410 million. From 1800 to 1914, a dramatic shift from farm to city had occurred and the vast majority of Europeans now dwelled in cities: in Great Britain 80% of the population lived in the cities; in Germany, 60%; and in France, 45%. Even Eastern Europe was not immune to urbanization as its city population stood at 30% by World War I. In 1800 only 21 European cities had a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants, whereas in 1914 that number had risen to 147 and continued to grow. London’s population had soared by more than six times to 6.5 million and Berlin’s from 172,000 to 2.7 million. The advanced industrial capacity provided new opportunities for work and attracted hordes of people to migrate from the rural areas to the city. The cities also gained population from improved health, sanitation, and living conditions as a result of the pressure of reformers and the decision of political authorities to embrace changes such as increasing fresh water supplies through the creation of elaborate dams and reservoirs and the construction of sewage systems. These changes gained the notice of American engineers and attest to the progress that had been made in the late 19th century. In July 1881, Ralph Hering of the Engineers Club of Philadelphia reported on his trip that examined the sewerage works of principal European cities. He stated that compared to American cities, the European cities took better care in the construction, inspection, and maintenance of their sewers. Hering related that he and the Crown Prince of Germany took an hour’s walk through the
Sewers of Hamburg and as far as odor was concerned there was little or no difference from going into a common cellar.21
The cities emerging in the last decades of the 19th century developed a distinctly modern appearance. The older boundaries of European cities gave way under the pressure of an increasing population. The redesign of Paris under Emperor Napoleon III with the creation of wide boulevards, parks, public buildings, university buildings, an opera house, and museums occurred in areas formerly the residence of the working classes. In Paris and other expanding cities, these persons became displaced and moved to the adjacent countryside and towns that soon thereafter became incorporated back into the metropolitan areas. One of the most visual and controversial events in late 19th century France was the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Despised by some and praised by others, it was a grand testimony to the industrial age. Opened to the public in May 1889, it became the tallest structure in the world at 984 feet or twice the height of the Washington Monument. Its skeletal structure comprised 6,875 tons of iron.22
European class structure also took on a new look as a result of this changing nature of society. The traditional upper classes remained very small, perhaps numbering only about 5% of society, although this group controlled nearly half the wealth in 1870. That percentage had declined precipitously by World War I. Throughout the course of the 19th century, aristocratic classes increasingly invested in the enterprises of the leading industrialists and businessmen and in some cases the mergers were sealed by the intermarriage of these groups. In addition, growing numbers of the industrialists purchased land to enhance their social respectability, and landed aristocrats bought homes in the city to enjoy the new urban living styles. Even older established educational patterns broke down as members of the new industrialist classes sent their sons to elite schools formerly reserved for the landed aristocracy.
The middle class also experienced change in the latter part of the 19th century. This class had a broad array of professions and occupations within its ranks, ranging from professionals such as well-to-do industrialists, business managers, large merchants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, accountants, and chemists to white collar workers such as salesmen, bookkeepers, bank tellers, and secretaries, and finally small shopkeepers and traders. The lower classes, including peasants, encompassed about 80% of the European population overall, with a larger urban working class population in Western Europe consisting of a large breadth of groups including skilled artisans, semiskilled workers, and unskilled laborers.
Families and gender roles also experienced significant changes. Birth rates dropped substantially throughout the course of the 19th century as most women did choose to wed. Birth control and new attitudes and perceptions about family life contributed to this decline. The restriction of employment opportunities for middle class women limited them to either accept marriage or seek the limited positions open to their sex—ecretarial, teaching, nursing, retail clerks, etc. The family became the central institution in the middle class. The traditional view that men dominated the workforce and women should remain at home to care for the family took deep root and dominated social mores and is often referred to as the cult of domesticity. This emphasis on the woman’s role as wife and mother created a different sense of family compared to the older rural and agrarian world. The wife’s idealized role took on that of character builder and nurturer for the children, protecting them from the taint of the outside world. Most middle-class families also hired domestic servants to free the wife from household duties and allow her more time to spend on establishing the proper home environment, emphasize the education of children, and encourage their future pursuits. The idea of a woman’s right to work generated tremendous attention not only in middle-class circles but also in the lower classes. Over time even the idea of lower-class women working in factories came under assault by working men or working class organizations as they supported the moral argument embraced by the middle class related to the cult of domesticity and the role of the wife and mother. But the fact remains that by 1900 women still constituted 23% of the French and 15% of the British work force.23 Prior to the movement for compulsory education, sons in lower-class families might perform odd jobs or seek apprenticeships while daughters would work at some job until marriage. Many lower class women found that their only outlets outside of the home were to become domestic servants in the domiciles of the upper or middle class families, work part-time in seedy, low-paying sweatshop industries, or resort to prostitution in order to survive. Women in this latter category usually broke out of the cycle by returning to work or eventually marrying.
The improved standard of living after 1871, which included better wages and a decline in the cost of goods, meant that the working classes had the means to purchase more items than just the essentials of food and housing. With additional cash in their pockets and a reduction in the work day and week, the lower classes began to enjoy the results of this new mass society such as the revolutionary emphasis on education, the rise of literacy, and the growth of leisure time pursuits. Education took on more significance in the 19th century. Beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, the states of Europe increasingly viewed elementary education as a necessity. Having the ability to read, write, and perform simple calculations was merely the beginning. The industrial age required more persons to have highly advanced technical skills and theoretical scientific knowledge and the ability to combine these two for practical applications.
Great Britain and Germany took the lead in education but had different approaches and results. Initially, Great Britain had a more relaxed idea and relied heavily on private initiatives to develop its educational institutions. Reports by several government commissions revealed that by 1860 nearly half of Great Britain’s school-aged children received some form of elementary education. In the end, a key purpose of educating the lower classes was to tame this large horde of the proletariat and have them join the mainstream of British society. In Germany the idea of compulsory education dated back to the era of Frederick the Great. Although the quality of education was haphazard, by the 19th century the situation had been reversed and German schools were the envy of the rest of Europe. By the 1860s, 97.5% of Prussian children attended school. The Saxon level was 100%. The German model required more years of schooling than in Great Britain and in addition established a foundation for civic-mindedness. As the 19th century progressed, the convergence of technical, scientific, and vocational education helped to ensure that workers were better prepared and needed less expensive and time-consuming on-the-job training. By 1900 state sponsored education systems had gradually appeared across Europe, and boys and girls usually between the ages of 6 and 12 attended some form of compulsory public school. In addition to providing moral instruction, civic education, and training for the increasingly complex skilled labor required in the factories, a literate electorate came to be viewed as essential as the suffrage was extended to most adult males. By 1900 illiteracy had virtually ceased to exist in the industrialized states of Western Europe, while it remained slightly more than 20% in the rural Eastern and Southeastern areas on the continent. The rise of literacy can be readily seen with the increase of newspapers (circulation of millions of copies a day), magazines, periodicals, and novels that had as their target a public with an insatiable appetite for reading not only for news and information but also for pleasure.
Leisure time was not new in the modern industrial world. In agrarian society it was directly tied to the tempo of farm life and the daily and seasonal work patterns of peasants and artisans. Urban life had a different rhythm. Workers in the factories toiled to a set clock, and their home and work life were generally separated by activity and distance. Thus, evening time, weekends, and holidays presented new opportunities for leisure activities. Transportation by rail or streetcar meant that one could engage in a growing number of pursuits not tied to the local neighborhood. Vacations and trips to beaches, formerly the purview of the well-to-do, became more common place for the public at large. Amusement parks, dance halls (London reportedly had 500 in the 1880s), and organized, professional sporting activities such as European football (soccer) gained wild popularity with the masses. Although these activities were often touted as a means to enhance people’s lives, in reality they certainly stimulated new business opportunities and provided distractions from the ordered and monotonous pace of everyday life of the working classes.
By 1900 the growth of industrialization and its attendant economic developments had created a true world economy. The working classes had for the most part begun to share in the benefits of the new modern society that had been created. That result had not been assured if one looked at the situation at mid-century. The legacy of the French Revolution and the spread of the Industrial Revolution led to increasing tensions between the factory owners and their laborers. Workers on occasion attempted to organize trade unions to advocate improved conditions and wages but in reality this activity had limited goals, such as to assist unemployed workers, and thus gained only minimal support. Effective change awaited the growth of socialist trade unions and the socialist parties after 1870. These trends received their impetus from the theories developed by Karl Marx around 1850. Karl Marx was from a middle class German family with Jewish roots. After earning a university degree, Marx’s atheist and radical political views led him to move to Paris where he met Friedrich Engels, the son of a German cotton manufacturer. Engels had worked in his father’s textile mills in Great Britain and had become convinced that factory workers were slaves to wages, a view he advanced in his 1844 work, The Conditions of the Working Class in England. The Marx-Engels collaboration got support from a group of mostly German socialist revolutionaries who had formed the Communist League. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. This work was the clarion call to action to those who advocated creating a radical working-class movement. Based upon earlier French socialist thought and German idealistic philosophy, the Communist Manifesto argued for the historical determination of economic forces. According to Marx and Engels, history had been replete with the struggle between the haves and the have-nots: the ancient clash between aristocrats and slaves had been replaced by one between the medieval landowners and the serfs, and that conflict had evolved into the 19th-century version with the bourgeoisie and its government support having the goal to suppress the industrial working classes or proletariat. Marx and Engels predicted that a bitter fight would ensue and result in the ultimate victory of the proletariat over its middle-class masters. Government would wither away and a classless society would emerge, and progress in all scientific and technical areas would ensure greater prosperity for all persons in society.
The failure of the revolutions in 1848 led Marx to London where he continued to express his ideas regarding economics. His major work, Capital, was unfinished at his death but was eventually completed by Engels. He and Engels harangued against a number of common industrial practices of his day including child labor. They argued that this common practice not only exploited the children involved but also the worker class at large by lowering the wages for adult laborers.25 Marx turned increasingly to efforts at organizing the working classes. He joined the International Working Men’s Association, a body that had as its stated goal improving the lot of the working classes. Its thrust was unsuccessful and eventually fell to the work of the trade union movement after 1870. In Great Britain, France, and Germany, trade unions won the right to organize and strike. By 1900 British trade unions had 2 million members, and that number doubled by World War I. The French and German experience was different. The trade union movement had a more direct link to the political process, as unions became affiliated with socialist parties. In France there were a number of socialist parties and the various trade unions split amongst them, leading to a weaker unified effort. The German approach was the most successful. Beginning in the 1860s, the trade unions forged a stronger alliance with the political structures in Prussia and other German states. As goals were achieved, the workers opted to seek incremental improvement within the political system rather than advocate revolution. By 1914 Germany had a trade union movement with 3 million members, second only to Great Britain, and 85% of these members belonged to socialist unions.
The real impetus for stability after 1870 was the trend toward full political democracy and reform in Western Europe. Great Britain built upon the Reform Bill of 1832 and the reform of factory conditions in the 1840s by passing two additional important measures in the 19th century: the Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the number of males eligible to vote from one million to two million, and the Reform Act of 1884, which virtually enfranchised all adult males in Great Britain. After the Franco-Prussian War, the Third Republic in France guaranteed universal male suffrage and established a political order that lasted more than six decades. The French government also addressed issues such as child labor. The first child labor law for the French had appeared in 1841, but real change did not get codified until 1871. The law required that no French child under the age of 12 could work in
Mines or industry. It also stipulated that children between 12 and 16 years of age could work no more than 12 hours a day. It also provided for sanitation and educational standards for working children. By the 1880s all child laborers had legal protection. The new German state also instituted voting rights for all adult males. In addition to the extension of suffrage, these states also enacted laws that provided for sickness, accident, and disability benefits as well as some form of pension plans. Germany also addressed child labor. Building upon earlier Prussian law, Germany banned children under the age of 12 from industrial employment. It further required that all children 12 to 14 years of age work only 6 hours a day, with 3 additional hours designated for schooling purposes. These measures, while introducing some reform, were in fact limited in their scope and generally in response to the perceived threat and strength of the growing socialist parties and the trade unions in the 1880s.26 However, along with improved working conditions and a better health and sanitation environment in the urban areas, the increase in voting rights and social welfare legislation as well as other incremental reform measures did much to gain a broad base of citizen loyalty to the modern nation state.
World History
