The theories of Karl Marx were based on the idea that all history was composed of class struggles. Marx had predicted that a struggle between the working class 'proletariat' and the factory-owning capitalist 'bourgeoisie' would ultimately (after a short dictatorship of the proletariat) herald the perfect 'communist' society in which everyone would be equal. Marxist teaching proved attractive intellectually but in the 1870s its message seemed largely irrelevant to a predominantly rural country with hardly any proletariat and still fewer bourgeoisie.
