Throughout 1848, revolutions spread through France, the German States, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Denmark. While all stemming from different internal causes, the revolutionaries were largely arguing for universal suffrage, liberal governments, and widespread democratic ideals. The revolutions ended a number of monarchies and enacted some reforms, but were largely reversed by reactionary movements within just a few years.

All of these theories emerged during the Enlightenment except for the Divine Right of Kings, which had its origins in the autocratic monarchies of the centuries that preceded the Enlightenment. The Divine Right of Kings stated that the right of the king to rule was divinely ordained by God and that to resist the king was therefore to resist the will of God.

Deism is the belief in a “watchmaker god,” a god who created the universe with a series of natural laws and then sat back and allowed the development of the universe to unfold. Deism emerged during the Enlightenment as a theocratic application of Enlightenment theories on natural law. It was widely embraced by Enlightenment thinkers, including Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire and involved the rejection of the established Christian order in Europe.

For centuries, Spain had been a region divided into various kingdoms, and had a famously wealthy polyglot society. Beginning with the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand over a united Spain, however, the Jews and Muslims were persecuted and forced to flee the country. The primary motivation was to centralize power under the new Spanish monarchs and develop a cohesive Spanish national identity that was centered around Catholicism.

King Louis XIV’s many wars and extravagant building works (like the palace at Versailles) contributed to the “golden era” of France, but they also mired the whole country in exorbitant debt. In French society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, only the Third Estate (the peasantry and the lower middle class) was subject to taxation. As the debt kept climbing, so did the rate of taxation of the poorest in French society. This would directly contribute to the outbreak of the French Revolution.

During the English Civil War, the Irish forces primarily supported the crown, the nobility, and Catholicism. In trying to suppress this support, Cromwell and his forces committed numerous atrocities and massacres in Ireland that would have dramatic ramifications in the next three hundred years of British-Irish relations. Some historians would contend that these atrocities are still very influential today.

The Declaration of Rights, sometimes called the English Bill of Rights, was enacted into law in 1689 following the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary to the throne. It was designed to ensure the continued supremacy of Parliament over the Crown indefinitely and to provide certain inalienable rights. All of these rights were included except for the universal right to free speech. Only members of Parliament had the absolute right to free speech; the common people were excluded.

Thomas Hobbes argued that the state should allow for only one religion to be practiced uniformly throughout it. He believed this was necessary to encourage order and stability and to prevent revolution.

All of these reforms were undertaken during the reign of the Austrian King Joseph II. Joseph was the son of Maria Theresa and was determined to continue his mother’s modernizing and enlightened reforms. As well as all of the reforms mentioned above, he also centralized the government, made German the official language of his territory, and took power away from the landed aristocracy.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man provided many freedoms to the lower classes of French society, but it did not establish universal suffrage. Women would not be given the right to vote in France until the twentieth century, much like in the rest of Europe.