Nantes Knife Attack: Bespoke Extremism Requires New Strategies for Ideological Analysis
Lycée Notre-Dame de Toutes Aides à Nantes, France, photo by; Pcappelaere, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A quiet, bespectacled teenage boy arrives at school dressed in black. He skips his morning classes. At lunchtime, he slips into the bathroom, carves into his forehead with a blade, scrawls blood-red graffiti on the walls, and prepares his weapons. Fifteen minutes later, he enters a classroom and unleashes staggering violence. He stabs one girl 57 times, killing her. He injures three others. He stops only after a school IT technician strikes him with a chair and corners him. Minutes later, he drops the knife, utters "What have I done?" and is arrested without resistance.
This could have been any number of school attacks from the past two decades. But the case of Justin P., a minor and student at a Nantes lycée, deserves special scrutiny not because of its brutality, but because of the fundamental flaws in how law enforcement, the media, and the general public are framing his motivation. In the days after the attack, French newspapers, including Le Monde and BFMTV, focused almost exclusively on his affinity for Hitler and Mein Kampf. However, the 16-year-old’s manifesto contained no references to Nazism, racial theories, or antisemitism.
The document Justin emailed to his entire school before the attack, L'action immunitaire ("The Immune Action"), was an articulate, elevated, and even erudite manifesto. It decried modern civilization as a machine for "decomposing humanity" and positioned the author as an immune response against "globalized ecocide" and "totalitarian social conditioning." Newspapers interviewed several of his peers and found that, aside from eco-extremism and Nazi rhetoric, Justin also expressed affinity for the 9/11 hijackers and other Islamic-inspired extremists. However, news and social media categorize him almost exclusively as Nazi-inspired.
The Incoherent Rage of Modern Extremism
The media's instinct to place Justin P. in a familiar ideological bucket reveals our collective discomfort with ambiguity. It's easier to label someone a Nazi than to confront the messy reality that contradictory belief systems often merge into worldviews researchers have labelled as "composite violent extremism," "fringe fluidity," or "salad bar ideology."
Justin himself was quoted as saying, “Je ne peux pas dire mes motivations car j’ai trop de raisons dans la tête” (“I can’t tell you my motivations because I have too many reasons in my head”). Yes, he had brought Mein Kampf to school and used Nazi imagery in social media profiles, but these symbols were likely mined for their shock value rather than to express deeply-held beliefs. Likewise, when speaking excitedly about the 9/11 perpetrators, it wasn’t their religious or political aims he extolled, but their ability to "[fly] a plane without knowing how." He didn’t admire Nazis and Islamic extremists for their ideologies, but was fascinated by their transgressive acts and the exhilaration of spectacular violence.
This cherry-picking of ideological elements without coherent synthesis is increasingly characteristic of modern extremism. The decentralization of radicalization pathways, through online spaces rather than hierarchical organizations, has allowed individuals like Justin P. to curate bespoke ideological profiles that merge far-right, jihadist, eco-extremist, accelerationist, and conspiratorial elements.
As Meleagrou-Hitchens and Ayad (2023) argue in their research on "The Age of Incoherence," today's extremist threat landscape is defined by ideological fluidity rather than doctrinal purity. This results in performance over commitment — the appropriation of extremist symbols and rhetoric to express personal grievance, alienation, and nihilistic despair.
Consequences of Ideological Misrepresentation
Historically, terrorist manifestos are ideologically coherent documents that justify violence, publicize grievances, inspire imitators, and immortalize the perpetrator. Justin P.'s L'action immunitaire exemplifies the recent shift towards fringe fluidity fueled by nihilism. It reveals more about his psychological state than his political vision. Eco-extremist rhetoric — claims about "globalized ecocide" and society as a "tumor" — wasn't connected to any specific political program. When he entered the classroom, he didn't target symbols of environmental destruction. He attacked a classmate with whom he reportedly had a positive relationship.
In the days before the attack, Justin created a Snapchat group to say goodbye: "Long life to you, I wish you only happiness, take care of your family." Then he blocked everyone. After his arrest, Justin described feeling "like I was in a lucid dream" and told police: "I began to run with the knife… a bit disconnected from myself…” The blood-red graffiti he left in the bathroom reflected a wish that someone would "slit [his] throat." This is not the language of ideological conviction but of profound psychological disturbance. His attack was a final act of self-destruction, not the beginning of a revolution.
Misrepresenting cases like Justin P.'s as simply ideologically motivated holds serious consequences. Lumping attackers into an easily digestible, pre-existing category relies on outdated frameworks that fail to capture the nature of contemporary extremism and bury underlying patterns that can help us identify and prevent future violence.
Multi-modal Analysis to Tackle Broader Frameworks
Casual observers and academic commentators speculated whether Justin was inspired by Christchurch’s Brenton Tarrant or motivated by personal grievances, such as misogyny, given his primary target. Yet his manifesto supports neither of those models. Unlike Tarrant, Justin P.'s text lacks coherent racialized narratives or broader ideological frameworks. The narrative arcs typical of misogynist violence were also absent.
This raises several important questions: To what extent do individuals who perpetrate political violence actually align with the ideological narratives they invoke? If ideological fidelity is partial, distorted, or even incidental, how should we interpret these acts? And in an era where ideological boundaries are increasingly blurred, do traditional classifications — such as left-wing, right-wing, religious, or ethnonationalist terrorism — adequately capture contemporary violent extremism?
Lankford and Silva (2024) termed ideological self-presentation that is disconnected from target selection as "motivational inconsistency." Their landmark study found that mass shooters with explicit manifestos often target victims unrelated to their declared enemies. In these instances, as in the case of Justin P., a scattered ideology serves as a rationalization more than a true guiding force.
Some analysts have begun describing cases like Justin's as "non-ideological terrorism," but this framing is fundamentally flawed. Terrorism, as frequently defined, cannot be non-ideological — it is violence committed to advance political, religious, or social objectives. More accurately, we're seeing a convergence between ideological terrorism and other forms of targeted violence. The modus operandi, tactical choices, and expressive elements of attackers like Tarrant and Gendron increasingly resemble those of school shooters and workplace attackers — and vice versa. This blurring of motivational boundaries requires new monitoring and analysis strategies.
The relationship between manifestos, ideology, and violence is increasingly tenuous. Manifestos remain potent strategic tools, but the ideologies they espouse are often incoherent amalgamations and psychological expressions rather than orthodox systems.
This suggests an urgent need to reinvent how we analyze and interpret ideological content. Traditional political categories—left-wing, right-wing, religious extremist—are increasingly inadequate to capture the hybrid, evolving nature of contemporary extremism. A framework capable of mapping complex interrelationships between ideological elements, psychological factors, and behavioral patterns is now required.
Recent advances in our multi-modal analysis and graph database technology present promising avenues for addressing these challenges. By approaching ideology as a network of interconnected core belief structures that manifest across different extremist movements, we have developed more nuanced understandings of how individuals like Justin P. curate their ideological frameworks.
Revontulet’s Ideological DNA project aims to map relationships between content (manifestos, social media posts), actions (attacks, demonstrations), and underlying belief structures. Rather than forcing cases into predetermined ideological categories, this approach treats ideology as a dynamic network of elements that can be analyzed at various levels of granularity.
This allows us to identify patterns in seemingly disparate cases — revealing, for instance, how nihilistic attraction to violence might manifest across nominally different ideological frameworks. For cases like Justin's, this approach could illuminate the distinction between superficial ideological signaling (i.e., Nazi imagery used for shock value) and genuine ideological commitment to terrorist attacks, potentially revealing early warning patterns and suggesting how to respond (i.e., psychological vs. counterterror interventions).
Security, Information, and Policy Protection
Security professionals, decision makers, educators, and policymakers require more sophisticated tools for understanding how ideology manifests in an era where the boundaries between personal grievance, psychological disturbance, and political violence are blurred.
Justin P.’s complex presentation—combining ideological rhetoric, shocking aesthetics, and nihilistic admiration for spectacular violence—exemplifies the kind of hybrid phenomenon that traditional frameworks struggle to classify, that Revontulet is mapping with greater clarity.
In an age of ideological incoherence, we need analytical tools that help us make sense of the chaos and identify patterns and connections that traditional taxonomies miss. Only then can we hope to develop more effective strategies for preventing the next Justin P. from translating incoherent rage into devastating violence.
Works Cited and Suggested Reading
Ebner, Julia, Chris Kavanagh, and Harvey Whitehouse. "Is There a Language of Terrorists? A Comparative Manifesto Analysis." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, published online August 9, 2022.
Gartenstein-Ross, Daveed, Andrew Zammit, Emelie Chace-Donahue, and Madison Urban. "Composite Violent Extremism: Conceptualizing Attackers Who Increasingly Challenge Traditional Categories of Terrorism." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, published online March 29, 2023.
Lankford, Adam, and Jason R. Silva. "What Effect Does Ideological Extremism Have on Mass Shootings? An Assessment of Motivational Inconsistencies, Risk Profiles, and Attack Behaviors." Terrorism and Political Violence, July 17, 2024.
Meleagrou-Hitchens, Alexander, and Moustafa Ayad. The Age of Incoherence? Understanding Mixed and Unclear Ideology Extremism. Washington, DC: Program on Extremism at George Washington University, June 2023.
Siggery, Alice, Daniel Hunt, and Calli Tzani. "Commentary on Language Variables Found within Lone Actor Terrorist Manifestos and the Directions for Future Research." Fields: Journal of Huddersfield Student Research, University of Huddersfield Press, 2023.
Ware, Jacob. Testament to Murder: The Violent Far-Right’s Increasing Use of Terrorist Manifestos. The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – ICCT, March 2020.