(Adnkronos) – French prisons recorded a surge in far-right detainees from 2016 to 2017, arrested for acts of violence and terrorism motivated by a desire for revenge after the November 13, 2015 Paris attacks. This is according to a 105-page report by the prison administration, commissioned to historian Nicolas Lebourg and obtained by broadcaster Bfmtv and the newspaper Liberation, whose findings were released two days before the anniversary of the attacks launched by ISIS in Paris in 2015, which claimed the lives of over 130 people. An event that, according to the report, radicalized far-right activists, dozens of whom ended up behind bars for violent actions.
Between 2022 and 2024, Lebourg, a researcher specializing in the far-right, met 104 detainees arrested since 2017 for acts of violence. Half were activists, convicted or implicated in street violence, the other half were “far-right terrorists,” involved in planning thwarted attacks. “The increase in violence motivated by various far-right ideologies is a global phenomenon occurring since 2015,” observes the historian. This is a radical change, given that before December 31, 2015, there was only one man convicted of far-right terrorism in prison in France. But the jihadist attacks of 2015 changed everything, the report emphasizes, with terrorist or rather “counter-terrorism” groups emerging in response to the jihadist massacres.
Among the 104 far-right detainees, some of whom have been released, are neo-Nazis or “accelerationists,” who want to accelerate a racial war in France; identitarians, who intend to “frighten” the Muslim enemy; and revolutionary nationalists, who want to build homogeneous white states. Then there are incels, “involuntary celibates” who hate women and contemporary society. 21 have expressed sympathy for the German Third Reich, 49 fear the “great replacement,” the alleged disappearance of white France due to immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. A common trait is antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism, which Lebourg groups under the term “alterophobia,” the fear of the other.
Between 2017 and today, French national intelligence has thwarted 23 attempted far-right terrorist attacks, according to Bfmtv information. During the same period, only one attack was successful: the assassination of Tunisian Hichem Miraoui by a far-right sympathizer in Puget-sur-Argens (Var) on May 31. Bfmtv recalls that at the end of 2016, Logan Nisin, a young man from Provence, founded the Secret Army Organization (Oas), a small group whose objectives included racist attacks against North Africans and a shooting at the Vitrolles mosque. Sentenced to nine years in prison, he has just been released. Simultaneously, another group, composed of former military personnel and called Action des forces opérationnelles (Afo), planned reprisals against French Muslims. Twelve members of the group were convicted of “terrorist criminal association” in September 2025.
But “the phenomenon is not limited to terrorism,” as street violence committed by the far-right is also “on the rise since 2015,” writes Lebourg. Police operations and dozens of arrests followed, with French prisons now having to manage “a constant flow of far-right individuals.”
To best manage this powder keg, given the coexistence in prison with detainees of Arab-Muslim origin, Lebourg suggests training prison staff to identify the “signs” of violent far-right radicalization. For Lebourg, these signs include, for example, the detainee’s denunciation of a “global conspiracy” or a “white genocide.”
