The Paris Commune - The Most Avoidable of the Revolutions

In 1848 Europe had been laboring under a system shock caused by what we would often consider to be the traditional causes of modern revolution. The political disequilibrium of the Second Empire had metastasized after Napoleon the Third's run of success in the 1850s gave way to his failures in the 1860s. Even absent the Franco-Prussian War, the liberal opposition to Napoleon the Third was riding so high by the late 1860s that it's kind of hard to not see France ending up with institutions that look an awful lot like the Third Republic one way or the other.