For those not that versed in European history, Wiki has a useful summary of what occurred that year. Talleyrand, whose record in interpreting events so far has been not-so-great, nonetheless rightly notes that such change is never linear and certainly wasn't all sweetness and light:

Tunisia... Egypt... Bahrain... Iran... Libya... Yemen... Sudan... Jordan... and even Morocco... Who knows there the mania will go next? The street revolts in these places seemed initially to recall 1968. But they are now looking more like 1848. Yet today there is no Marx to make sense of them.

Those who prefer 1848 to 1968 should take heed of the past. The response to those revolutions was violent. They did not, amazingly, result in a major war among any of Europe's major powers unless we consider (as Marx might have done) 1914 to have been the logical outcome of the forces they unleashed. In their own time, however, none, with the partial exceptions of those in Denmark and Switzerland, resulted in the ideal, liberal democracy they urged so passionately.