While 1789 was in everybody’s minds during these events, the revolution of 1848 differed from its predecessor in many respects. Most obvious was its European dimension. In the 1790s the French revolutionaries had spread their ideas across large swathes of the Continent by force of arms. In 1848 they did not need to do this; revolutions broke out in many different countries almost simultaneously. A large part of the reason for this lay in the vastly improved state that communications had reached by the middle of the nineteenth century.
