French Second Republic

State · 1848–1852 CE · at its largest around 1848 CE

The republic proclaimed after the 1848 revolution overthrew Louis-Philippe; its president, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, later made himself emperor.

On its lands while it lasted

Palmyra (c. 261–1929 CE): Capital of Palmyrene Empire (261–269).
Kingdom of Kongo (c. 1390–1914 CE): Central African kingdom with its capital at Mbanza Kongo; after Portuguese contact in 1483 its rulers adopted Christianity, and it later became deeply entangled in the Atlantic slave trade.
Köneürgenç (c. 1512–1919 CE): Capital of Khanate of Khiva (1512–1919).
Middle Passage (c. 1526–1866 CE): The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. Of about 12.5 million people embarked between the 16th and 19th centuries, some 1.8 million died on the crossing.
Mughal Empire founded (1526–1857 CE): Empire founded by Babur that at its height ruled most of the Indian subcontinent, famed for its wealth, administration and architecture.
Slave trade, Angola to Brazil (c. 1550–1850 CE): The largest single branch of the Atlantic slave trade carried millions of captives from West Central Africa, above all Luanda, directly to Brazilian ports such as Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, until Brazil ended imports in 1850.
Kingdom of Dahomey (c. 1600–1904 CE): Fon kingdom centred on Abomey in present-day Benin, known for its female soldiers and its role in the Atlantic slave trade; conquered by France in 1894.
Ashanti Empire (1701–1901 CE): Akan state founded by Osei Tutu with its capital at Kumasi, which grew wealthy on gold and trade and resisted British expansion in a series of wars.
Muhammad Ali of Egypt (1769 CE – 1849 CE): An Ottoman Albanian commander who became governor of Egypt in 1805 and launched sweeping military and economic modernization; his dynasty ruled Egypt until 1952.
Victor Hugo (1802 CE – 1885 CE): French poet, novelist and dramatist of the Romantic movement, author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), who spent nearly twenty years in exile as an opponent of Napoleon III.
Gregor Mendel (1822 CE – 1884 CE): Augustinian friar and later abbot in Brno, Moravia, whose experiments on pea plants revealed the basic rules of heredity. His 1866 paper was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900.
Louis Pasteur (1822 CE – 1895 CE): French chemist and microbiologist in Paris who developed pasteurisation, supported germ theory and created vaccines against anthrax and rabies.
Claude Monet (1840 CE – 1926 CE): French painter whose Impression, Sunrise gave Impressionism its name. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he painted his water garden again and again for the rest of his life.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 CE – 1900 CE): German philosopher and classical philologist whose works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, attacked traditional morality and religion and introduced ideas such as the will to power.
Revolutions of 1848 (1848–1849 CE): A wave of liberal and national revolutions spread across Europe in 1848, from Paris to Vienna, Berlin and Budapest. Most were suppressed by 1849, but serfdom was abolished in Austria.