On September 8, 2026, the New York State trial will open against Luigi Mangione, suspected of having shot dead Brian Thompson, the boss of UnitedHealthcare, the largest private insurance company in the United States, in December 2024 in New York. The federal trial against Luigi Mangione was postponed until the beginning of 2027. In France, a little over a century ago, a similar case hit the headlines: the Marcel Muller affair, named after the worker who killed one of the managers of the General Electricity Company following the cessation of payment of his disability pension.
This story takes place on February 14, 1922, in Paris. A young 20-year-old worker, mutilated at work, named Marcel Muller, kills with a revolver the head of litigation at his company, the General Electricity Company. The facts occurred following the termination of his pension and the award of a disability pension which he considered insufficient (the equivalent of 1,700 current euros per year), while the wound resulting from his amputation of his right arm had still not healed. Marcel Muller also injured two police officers during his arrest. This news item has a national impact. The entire press covered it, more than a hundred articles appeared in the days that followed, to the point of transforming the event into an “affair”, which was quickly called the “Muller affair”.
From news item to social event
While the “broken faces” and the war invalids questioned French society about the fate of the mutilated at the end of the First World War, the Muller affair became a real social event. The workers’ movement – political and trade union – and the very young Federation of Disabled Workers took up the affair, not to justify the crime, but to denounce the 1898 law on industrial accidents.
According to them, it condemned to social death and misery those it was supposed to protect, by granting destitute annuities. They also called into question – and highlighted – the abuses of private insurance and companies in this area. In 1922, as Social Security did not yet exist, the insurance system for disabled workers was in the hands of the private sector, like the current American health model.
Under pressure from the media (at the time, it was the written press which played this role) and public opinion, the law of 1898 was modified: a first time during the judicial investigation, in July 1922, then several times thereafter. As for Marcel Muller, he was finally acquitted by the Seine Assize Court on October 31, 1922, following a spectacular trial bringing together eminent medical experts, such as the psychologist Henri Wallon and renowned political figures, called by the defense, such as Joseph Paul-Boncour (lawyer, deputy and former minister of Labor) or Justin Godart (lawyer, deputy and former undersecretary of state in charge of the labor service). military health).
The Muller affair became, from then until the 1930s, a reference for organizations defending disabled workers and contributed to fueling reflection on the protection of workers, before the birth of the welfare state.
Marcel Muller / Luigi Mangione: a disturbing symmetry
A century apart and an ocean (Atlantic) away, without prejudging the verdict of Luigi Mangione’s future trials, it appears today that many points in common link the Muller affair and the Mangione affair. The most striking of these common denominators being the youth of the accused, both in their twenties (Luigi Mangione was 26 years old at the time of the facts).
Furthermore, their two profiles escape the usual media stories, with on one side a young worker mutilated by work, on the other a young man from a good family and a good education. The problems encountered are also close. The first was the victim, after his amputation, of the early allocation of a disability pension by his insurer (less expensive than covering convalescence costs), while the second, suffering from spondylolisthesis, was a victim or witness (the investigation will determine) of the practices of American private health insurance, following a back operation.
With no activist background or criminal records, these two young men, ordinary and without history, were turned upside down when they saw their destinies shattered. Their written demands are almost identical: “Frankly, these parasites deserved it” for Luigi Mangione; “I’m going to kill my boss, too bad for him. He wanted it, he deserved it” for Marcel Muller.
It is certainly for all of these reasons that the two cases had such an impact. If, in 1922, information was not as globalized as today, the Muller affair still made the front page of the European edition of the Chicago Tribune and was covered by several dozen articles in the Anglo-Saxon and international press.
The weight of public opinion
A relatively rare phenomenon for criminal cases, we observe in both cases public opinion which tends to understand their actions and to forgive their perpetrator, or even for certain fringes in the United States, to support and justify revenge. This indulgence is explained by a form of empathy, of identification of civil society with their “cause”.
In 1922, in France, it was the war invalids who raised public awareness of the issue of disability, since with more than a million disabled people, each French person had at least one disabled person or a war disabled person in their family/relationship circle and knew the difficulties they could endure (downgrading, unemployment, etc.). In the United States, millions of Americans have experienced problems or refusal of medical coverage by their private insurer, with sometimes dramatic consequences; not to mention the price and deductibles they pay to benefit from health coverage.
For Marcel Muller as for Luigi Mangione, it is the involvement of private companies in the field of health which is at the origin of their action. And if they are reprehensible, their actions illustrate situations of physical and moral suffering caused by the abuses of commercial actors. Marcel Muller was thus the victim of litigation proceedings aimed at reducing his compensation. This type of practice, still common in the United States and summarized by the “three Ds” (“Delay, Deny, Defend”that is to say “Delay, deny and defend”), are exactly those that Luigi Mangione despises.
The only difference between these two cases comes from their symbolic significance, because, if his trial made him an emblem, Marcel Muller’s gesture was initially one of personal revenge, as indicated in his letter of demand. That of Luigi Mangione seems, for its part, to have a political dimension, denouncing the liberal American health system and private insurance companies, as his writings written several months before the crime would attest. This is what has earned him today being accused of “act of political violence” by the federal state. His upcoming trials will perhaps shed a little more light on his deeper motivations.
Morgan Poggioli is the author of The Muller Affair – Politicizing broken bodiespublished in April 2026 by Éditions de l’Atelier.
