Quote Originally Posted by Rhyfelwyr View Post
It is an interesting quirk of history that what you said actually holds true way further back than 1848. The British establishment has always had to fear its population in a way that rulers on the continent have not. One consequence of the widespread adoptation of the longbow was that the 'middling sorts' (yeomen farmers and the like) had the firepower to seriously challenge the elite heavy cavalry of the nobility. IIRC the French banned the longbow for this reason - it would have been dangerous in their own strict feudal order to give peasants the capacity to defeat their rulers in battle. Again, IIRC, such considerations played a part in the Papal ban on the use of the crossbow.
True enough.

Things never happen in isolation, and finding a "first cause" is always problematic due to the inevitability of prior important events. But even though there are events prior to 1848. England has their history, Germany(+east) had their peasant wars, the Low Countries had their republic, the French revolution, etc etc...

Still, I regard 1848 as higher than all of those because of the international nature of the revolution. All of the above were confined to a particular area(even if it drew in other powers). 1848 happened basically everywhere, all at once. To me, that is very significant.