A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of radical Islam. Faced with the sudden emergence of a new revolutionary ideology, the historian is seized by a sense of déjà vu. There are indeed striking parallels between the violent entrance of Islamism onto the world stage in the year 2001, and the rise of communism, which first made its presence felt in the revolutionary year of 1848. As the old order appeared to be collapsing, Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto. They argued that the proletariat, the new urban class created by the industrial revolution, was destined to supplant the bourgeoisie as the vehicle of political change. Just as liberalism had been the ideology of the bourgeoisie, so communism would be the new ideology of the proletariat. The rise of communism that began in 1848 reached its climax a century later, by which time it had achieved domination over much of the globe, but its decline and fall soon followed, in the equally dramatic revolutionary year of 1989. The heirs of Marx and Engels on the European Left today see Europe’s disaffected young Muslims as the new revolutionary class, and Islamism is its ideology.

This is exactly the right time for a new book entitled 1848: Year of Revolution. The Scottish historian Mike Rapport has written a fine synthesis which makes sense of the confusing multiple narratives of this tumultuous period. Unlike the great Lewis Namier, he does not see 1848