The paper situates the 1940 murder of the Syrian nationalist politician ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar within the changing dynamics of urban socio-political networks at the intersection of traditional politics of notables and new forms of working class mobilization. Shahbandar, who had participated in the Syrian Revolt of the 1920s, returned from exile in 1937 and fell victim to political infighting with the dominant nationalist bourgeois elite politicians of the National Bloc party. His assassins were urban roughs, who thus did not belong to the – well researched – Young Effendiyya middle class formation with its secular leanings. Instead, they were organized in a Sufi brotherhood that attracted working class people. In addition, members of the bourgeois National Bloc party most likely instigated Shahbandar's murder in the context of an urban patron-client relationship. The incident therefore provides multiple and conflicting perspectives on youth and class mobilization during a period of transition from elite to mass politics. The presentation is based on primary documents collected in archives and libraries in Lebanon, France, Italy, the UK and the USA. They offer microhistoric detail about the prosecution and trial that followed the crime, as well as detail about the historical context of French Mandate justice and the anxieties and pressures of World War II that influenced all participating actors. The research of which this paper is a part therefore offers deep insights into the social context of political violence. It presents this social context as it emerges out of the proceedings of a criminal investigation and a court case, which is a tested methodology in microhistory, but not one that has been used a lot in Middle East history. Finally, the particular timing of the crime and its investigation and prosecution overlaps with the period of Vichy rule in Mandate Syria. There is therefore a great potential for multicontextual research that throws light on an event from local, regional and global perspectives.