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Luigi Mangione And The Renaissance Of Class Warfare

Terrorism is always wrong. But it’s not always surprising.

Steve QJ
5 min readJan 6, 2025
Photo by Felea Emanuel on Unsplash

January 21st, 1793. After years of soaring living costs, failed harvests, and ongoing political turmoil, millions of members of France’s working class, also known as the sans-culottes, faced homelessness, bankruptcy and starvation.

Worst of all, they had no way to do anything about it.

Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette didn’t care if they lived or died, the Estates-General kept power in the hands of the nobles and clergy (also known as the richest 5% of the population), and the concept of citizen’s rights was still only four years old.

So the sans-culottes did what any self-respecting group of 18th-century peasants tired of the social order would do and chopped off King Louis XVI’s head.

And while this didn’t go down too well with Louis’ fellow aristocrats, as Maximilien Robespierre pointed out, it was inevitable. After all, the interests of the aristocracy could never align with the interests of the sans-culottes.

Louis represented a world where the poor had to stay poor, where they were only useful as a resource for the rich to use and discard. And this, as Robespierre also pointed out, meant they needed to reconsider the rules:

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Steve QJ
Steve QJ

Written by Steve QJ

Race. Politics. Culture. Sometimes other things. Almost always polite. Find more at https://steveqj.substack.com

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