Beginning in 1848, the year Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto, a series of bloody uprisings engulfed Europe. Like a lit fuse, the protests leaped from Italy to France to the independent states of Germany, to the Hapsburg Empire, until much of Western Europe was aflame with revolutionary fervor. The causes of the unrest, fueled in part by widespread economic hardships, differed from place to place, but a common thread running through the protest movements was a demand for democratic reforms and basic civil rights.
