The revolutions of 1848, also known as the springtime of the peoples, were a series of revolutions throughout Europe over the course of more than one year, from 1848 to 1849. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to date.

The revolutions varied widely in their aims but generally opposed conservative systems, such as absolute monarchy and feudalism, and sought to establish nation states, founded on constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. The revolutionary wave began with the Sicilian revolution in January and spread across Europe after the French revolution in February 1848. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no significant coordination or cooperation among their respective revolutionaries. Some of the major political contributing factors were widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, for freedom of the press, and by the working class for economic rights, and the rise of nationalism. Other economic factors, such as the European potato failure, triggered mass starvation, migration, and civil unrest.

The uprisings were led by temporary coalitions of workers and reformers, including figures from the middle and upper classes (the bourgeoisie); however these coalitions did not hold together for long. Many of the revolutions were quickly suppressed, as tens of thousands of people were killed, and even more were forced into exile. Despite this, significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands. The revolutions were most important in France, the Netherlands, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the states of the German Confederation that would make up the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The wave of uprisings ended in October 1849.

The revolutions arose from a wide variety of causes, which were linked to the socioeconomic transformations brought about by industrialization and the political legacy of the French Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm considered the revolutionary wave of 1848 to have been the result of the "crisis in the development of the new society" which had begun with the previous revolutions of 1830. This crisis arose from the confluence of processes from both the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution (the "dual revolution"), including the intensification of industrialization and urbanization, the spread of oppositional ideologies, namely liberalism and radicalism, the emergence of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy as the most powerful class in Europe, and its rivalry with the growing working class. In addition, an acute economic crisis between 1845 and 1847, resulting from the combination of a food crisis and an industrial recession, led to significant civil unrest and revolutionary agitation. According to Jonathan Sperber, the failure of governments to adjust to popular demands for reform in the wake of these crises provided the immediate trigger for the revolutions, with the conditions for their outbreak having already been met by the end of 1847.

In Western and Central Europe, discontent was widely felt against the existing political and economic regimes as living standards declined essentially uniformly among the poorer classes. Much of this discontent stemmed from the "decorporation" of society through the decline of the traditional systems of guilds and feudal relations in favor of capitalist enterprise and private land ownership. Other factors resulting from this transition, specifically overpopulation, the exploitation of labourers and the competitive "race to the bottom" to reduce wages, also played a major role. The most visible fault lines resulting from the decline of the traditional economy were the conflicts between peasants and landowners (both feudal and private) and employers and workers.

According to Jonathan Sperber, conflict over agricultural land rights was the most prevalent form of social conflict in the pre-revolutionary period. The abolition of feudalism in parts of Western and Central Europe (especially in France) in the wake of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had major ramifications for the rural populace. Customary rights that peasants had once held on common land, especially to acquire wood from communal forests, were increasingly lost with the enclosure and privatization of the commons. These processes were often aided by modernizing states, such as France, which, with the enactment of the Forest Code of 1827, legally abolished peasants' rights to forests and the wood within them.

Peasants resorted to both legal and violent means to reclaim their land rights. Lawsuits were frequently filed by peasants against landowners, and could remain active for decades; one such lawsuit in Sicily was first brought in 1829 and not settled until 1896. Peasants also stole wood from privatized forests or occupied them to reassert their land rights by force. Wood theft in particular was widespread in parts of Germany. Between the 1820s and 1840s, the number of those convicted of wood theft in the Bavarian Palatinate increased from 100,000 in 1829–30 to 185,000 in 1846–47, accounting for a third of the population, and attempts to suppress wood theft in the same period by Prussia led to what Sperber called a "minor civil war" in the province of Westphalia. Unrest among the peasantry was also widespread in regions that retained feudalism, as in parts of Central Europe and most of Eastern Europe, though this had been commonplace for several centuries. Disputes and revolts were directed variously at oppressive lords, taxation and military conscription by the state, and religious authorities. The largest pre-revolutionary peasant uprising against feudal lords occurred in Austrian Galicia in 1846, which put an end to the Kraków Uprising by the Polish nobility.

In towns and cities, social conflict centered on conflicts between employers and workers. The most persistent conflicts were between master tradesmen and journeymen, who had long struggled for influence within the guild system. New disputes were also emerging between merchants and outworkers, or contracted workers as part of the putting-out system; these workers were often also artisans, including both master tradesmen and the journeymen and apprentices they hired. As with the peasantry, discontent among urban workers largely stemmed from the transition away from traditional modes of production and toward a capitalist economy. Workers protested for the right to work and freedom of association, which had been lost with the decline of the guilds, as they underwent proletarianization and felt their status in society deteriorate.