http://1.So  many intriguing similarities between what happened today in Washington and what happened in Montreal on April 25 1849, when a violent crowd stormed the Province of Canada’s parliament. #cdnhst #twitterstorians

2.Just like today, that night started with a raucous open air rally, where an audience primed by years of violent rhetoric and perceptions of grievance were urged to continue their demonstration outside the seat of government.

3.With their path lit by torchlight and confidence roused by rowdy chants and song, the crowd arrived at parliament to jeer the establishment’s support for a political order that they saw as deeply antithetical to their power and privilege.

4. In this case, the principle of responsible government, i.e. handing greater power to the democratically elected legislature.

http://5.As  was the case today, this wasn’t only theoretical- they actually interrupted the session where the governor was granting royal assent to legislation that confirmed this very principle.

6.When the crowd arrived at parliament, they encountered a police force both unwilling and unable to prevent them from storming into the building itself, where they ran amok, engaging in spontaneous acts of ribald political theatre.

7.They sat in the speaker’s chair, kicked the portrait of Queen Victoria and, ultimately, paraded the parliamentary mace through the city’s streets.

http://8.In  the end, the rioters of 1849 set fire to the drapes and the building burned to the ground. I suspect that had the capital in Washington been a rickety old wooden market the same thing might have occurred today.

9.What comes next? If the parallels continue, a deep reckoning with what constitutes legitimate political engagement in a democratic society. Can raucous protest and even collective violence ever be justified as a response to political grievance?

10.On a pessimistic note, this might mean an emerging consensus that any form of popular protest is an unwelcome intervention in public life that does longterm damage to the ability of those on society’s margins wishing to make their voice heard in the democratic process.

11. The very real threat that violence poses to democratic institutions can be used to legitimize the connections between political authority and a brand of elite decorum that perpetuates and deepens social inequalities.

12.The fragility of democracy, we ought to remember, has deep roots. The attack on parliament in Canada in 1849 did not come out of the blue.

13. It grew out of decades of increasingly violent political rhetoric, all of which boiled down to a core belief that certain people, because of their race, gender, and class, could not stake a legitimate claim to political power.

14.I wrote a lot about this stuff in my new (ish) book- Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal https://www.mqup.ca/taking-to-the-streets-products-9780228001263.php