linguistic:translation, linguistic:paraphrasing
Legacy

"We have been beaten and humiliated... scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Historian Priscilla Robertson posits that many goals were achieved by the 1870s, but the credit primarily goes to the enemies of the 1848 revolutionaries, commenting: "Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement. Thiers ushered in a third French Republic, Bismarck united Germany, and Cavour, Italy. Deák won autonomy for Hungary within a dual monarchy; a Russian czar freed the serfs; and the British manufacturing classes moved toward the freedoms of the People's Charter."

Liberal democrats looked to 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity. For nationalists, 1848 was the springtime of hope, when newly emerging nationalities rejected the old multinational empires, but the end results were not as comprehensive as many had hoped. Communists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat. The view of the Revolutions of 1848 as a bourgeois revolution is also common in non- Marxist scholarship. Middle-class anxiety and different approaches between bourgeois revolutionaries and radicals led to the failure of revolutions. Many governments engaged in a partial reversal of the revolutionary reforms of 1848–1849 as well as heightened repression and censorship. The Hanoverian nobility successfully appealed to the Confederal Diet in 1851 over the loss of their noble privileges, while the Prussian Junkers recovered their manorial police powers from 1852 to 1855. In the Austrian Empire, the Sylvester Patents (1851) discarded Franz Stadion 's constitution and the Statute of Basic Rights, while the number of arrests in Habsburg territories increased from 70,000 in 1850 to one million by 1854. Nicholas I's rule in Russia after 1848 was particularly repressive, marked by an expansion of the secret police (the Tretiye Otdeleniye) and stricter censorship; there were more Russians working for censorship organs than actual books published in the period immediately after 1848. In France, the works of Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were confiscated.

In the post-revolutionary decade after 1848, little had visibly changed, and many historians considered the revolutions a failure, given the seeming lack of permanent structural changes. More recently, Christopher Clark has characterised the period that followed 1848 as one dominated by a revolution in government. Karl Marx expressed disappointment at the bourgeois character of the revolutions. Marx elaborated in his 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" a theory of permanent revolution according to which the proletariat should strengthen democratic bourgeois revolutionary forces until the proletariat itself is ready to seize power. The Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Manteuffel declared that the state could no longer be run like the landed estate of a nobleman. In Prussia, August von Bethmann-Hollweg 's Preußisches Wochenblatt newspaper (founded 1851) acted as a popular outlet for modernising Prussian conservative statesmen and journalists against the reactionary Kreuzzeitung faction. The Revolutions of 1848 were followed by new centrist coalitions dominated by liberals nervous of the threat of working-class socialism, as seen in the Piedmontese Connubio under Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.

Governments after 1848 were forced into managing the public sphere and popular sphere with more effectiveness, resulting in the increased prominence of the Prussian Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten (Central Press Agency, established 1850), the Austrian Zensur-und polizeihofstelle, and the French Direction Générale de la Librairie (1856). Nevertheless, there were a few immediate successes for some revolutionary movements, notably in the Habsburg lands. Austria and Prussia eliminated feudalism by 1850, improving the lot of the peasants. European middle classes made political and economic gains over the next 20 years; France retained universal male suffrage. Russia would later free the serfs on 19 February 1861. The Habsburgs finally had to give the Hungarians more self-determination in the Ausgleich of 1867. The revolutions inspired lasting reform in Denmark as well as the Netherlands. Reinhard Rürup has described the 1848 Revolutions as a turning point in the development of modern antisemitism through the development of conspiracies that presented Jews as representative both of the forces of social revolution (apparently typified in Joseph Goldmark and Adolf Fischhof of Vienna) and of international capital, as seen in the 1848 report from Eduard von Müller-Tellering, the Viennese correspondent of Karl Marx 's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which declared that "tyranny comes from money and the money belongs to the Jews ".

About 4,000 exiles went to the United States fleeing the reactionary purges. Of these, 100 went to the Texas Hill Country as German Texans. More widely, many disillusioned and persecuted revolutionaries, in particular (though not exclusively) those from Germany and the Austrian Empire, left their homelands for foreign exile in the New World or in the more liberal European nations; these emigrants were known as the Forty-Eighters.