{"id":4305,"date":"2021-01-20T13:09:23","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T12:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=4305"},"modified":"2021-12-21T10:20:18","modified_gmt":"2021-12-21T09:20:18","slug":"the-long-history-of-storming-parliament-buildings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/2021\/01\/20\/the-long-history-of-storming-parliament-buildings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long History of Storming Parliament Buildings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Go But Once to Darmstadt!\u2019 \u2013 \u2018Let\u2019s Walk Down Pennsylvania Avenue\u2019<\/h1>\n

The Long History of Storming Parliament Buildings<\/h2>\n

Matthias Miller | 20 January 2021
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

In his last days in office as President of the United States of America, on 6 January 2021 Donald Trump called on his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest the Electoral College vote count taking place there. The ensuing scenes, which culminated in a mob storming and vandalising the halls of Congress in Washington D.C., remain fresh in our minds. Some commentators spoke of the downfall of democracy, a desecration of that most iconic of democratic landmarks, and drew parallels with the thwarted storming of the Capitol in Rome in 390 BCE by the Senones, a Celtic tribe under a military leader named Brennus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The history of storming parliament buildings extends from antiquity to the present day. The causes, instigators, and execution of these events, however, vary widely, and they can be roughly divided into four groups. The first includes the seizure of parliaments by foreign military forces in the course of an armed conflict or war. The second group encompasses the capture of a parliament building by domestic military or paramilitary forces as part of a coup. The storming of parliaments, seats of government, or palaces by revolutionary insurgents falls into the third group, while the fourth includes the storming of parliaments by a usually unarmed group of demonstrators, commonly referred to as a mob, an abbreviation for mobile vulgus<\/em>, which loosely translates as \u2018the fickle commoners\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the case of the first group, the event takes place almost coincidentally in the course of the war, and usually represents only the symbolic conclusion of a military campaign. In August 1814, for example, when British troops conquered Washington they burned down the Capitol building, the seat of the American Congress. The raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 is one of the best-known examples of the conquest of a parliament building by foreign troops. The fact that in this instance it had been years since any assembly had met in the captured building (which had lain in ruins since 1933) made no difference at all. The event still proved highly valuable for propaganda purposes, and was fully exploited in Yevgeny Khaldei\u2019s famous staged photographs.<\/p>\n

\"Raising

Raising the Soviet Flag on the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945, Yevgeny Khaldei \u00a9 DHM<\/p><\/div>\n

The list of parliaments stormed during military coups is long. One of the most recent such moments in living memory in Western Europe was in Madrid on 23 February 1981, and many will remember the images of members of the Guardia Civil and armed soldiers storming the parliament building in an attempt to overthrow the fledgling democracy and reintroduce a dictatorship in Spain. The situation was only brought under control when the army\u2019s commander-in-chief, King Juan Carlos, delivered a courageous televised speech.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n