The failure of the French Revolution to produce any lasting change, the even deeper entrenchment of absolutist kings and nobles in Europe, and a growing knowledge of unprecedented personal freedom and opportunity of immigrants to America, not enjoyed by their family members still remaining in Europe, led to a series of uprisings of the people against their absolutist rulers in 1848.
“The history of Europe, then, from 1815 to 1848 was, generally speaking, a sequel to the history of Europe from 1789 to 1814. There were no really new motifs in the composition. The main trouble was still the struggle, though often a blind and misdirected struggle, of the interests of ordinary men against the Great Power system which cramped and oppressed the life of mankind.”
H. G. Wells, Outline of History, Part II, The Realities and Imaginations of the Nineteenth Century: The Fermentation of Ideas, 1848, 38.3
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