The Stonebreakers and The Communist Manifesto
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| Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849
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The Stonebreakers by Courbet undeniably depicts the concern for the plight of the poor and the working class. The two figures toil to remove stone from a road in construction. This work requires little skill and almost no intellectual capacity and is usually reserved for punishing chain gangs in modern times. Rather than glorifying their work, Courbet dresses his figures in tattered garbs to further illustrate the nature of their work and the intense amount of physical exertion needed. Additionally, this work embodies the realist movement as Courbet paints an accurate account of the ill-treatment and of the workers that was an all too common facet of mid-century rural life in France. Courbet makes a point to retain the workers identity in order for the work to transcend the individual and serve as a universal representation of suffering.
The two stonebreakers and the surrounding scene are painted with rough brushwork, reflecting the work itself. The figures are positioned against a low hill typical of rural France. The hill rises and takes up the entire upper half of the composition, leaving only a small window to the sky in the upper right hand corner. This effectively isolates the laborers and suggests that they are physically and socio-economically trapped by their work. One year prior to Courbet’s The Stonebreakers, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels published The Communist Manifesto. They write about the plight of the worker in Chapter 1 of the manifesto titled Bourgeois and Proletarians, “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” Courbet, whether intentionally or not, embodies the ideas of Marx and Engels through his realist depiction of the plight of the laboring class in France in his work The Stonebreakers.
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