Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"After abdicating, Louis-Philippe fled France in disguise. Despite political problems in the 1840s, what really transformed the situation was economic discontent, with bad harvest, high food prices, and rising unemployment. . . . Small wonder that in the 1848 elections a massive majority of voters turned to the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "For the revolution which broke out in the first months of 1848 was not a social revolution merely in the sense that it involved and mobilized all social classes. It was in the literal sense the rising of the laboring poor in the cities--especially the capital cities--of Western and Central Europe. Theirs, and theirs almost alone, was the force which toppled the old regimes from Palermo to the borders of Russia. When the dust settled on their ruins, workers--in France actually socialist workers--were seen to be standing on them, demanding not merely bread and employment, but a new state and society." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 305]