This is not a Netflix show. On 24 April, 15-year-old Lorène was stabbed 57 times in her classroom in Nantes by 16-year-old Justin P., and died. Her killer then proceeded to another classroom, where he stabbed three more students, leaving one critically injured.

 

 

Moments earlier, Justin P. had been in the bathroom, uploading a ‘deep ecology’ manifesto to the school’s online platform. Shortly after, he was apprehended and placed in custody. The decision to detain him was later suspended, as his mental state was deemed incompatible with detention.

 

 

This paragraph contains most of what has captivated the media: on the one hand, the shape-shifting ideology presented in the manifesto (likely ghost-written by ChatGPT), which has little to do with the actual events, and on the other, Justin P.’s complex psychological profile. These narratives focus on what happened before and after the crime, supposedly to help us understand the ‘why.’ Yet they conspicuously omit an accessible, essential fact—something the media, eager to weave analytical threads around this tragedy, seems to forget:there is a perfectly adequate word for what Justin P. committed, namely, femicide.

 

 

Lorène was deliberately targeted. Le Monde reported that Justin P. ‘entered a classroom looking for someone, left, then came back to attack,’ armed with a hunting knife, a folding blade, an airsoft pistol, and wearing a helmet. The killer knew his victim. According to his police statements, published by Presse Océan and reported further by Le Monde, Justin P. had planned that morning to speak with Lorène, described by the prosecutor as ‘the only person at school with whom he had meaningful conversations.’ According to BFMTV, students interviewed by police said Justin P. had made romantic advances toward Lorène during a school trip, advances she had rejected. A source quoted in Le Monde lists ‘romantic disappointment’ as the first among several ‘contradictory motives.’

 

 

It is up to investigators to determine Justin P.’s motives, but these elements cast doubt on whether this was ‘merely’ the act of a madman or a political radical. I am not asking the media to act as judge and jury—’femicide’ doesn’t carry legal weight in France anyway. But surely one of the responsibilities of the media is to provide all the relevant interpretive frameworks for analysing social phenomena, and femicide is one of them.

 

 

And so I Googled Nantes knife attack ‘femicide.’ There’s a certain irony in putting that word in quotation marks, just to force the search engine to return sources that name it plainly. The only mainstream press article mentioning it appeared in Le Parisien, one of France’s most widely read daily newspapers with a centrist editorial stance. In an interview with a psychotherapist titled: ‘Nantes Killing: “We See This Level of Brutality in Femicides”’, the expert acknowledges the pattern similarity, only to dismiss the hypothesis in favour of an individualised, psychiatric interpretation.

 

 

‘Psychic dissociation,’ ‘paranoid atmosphere,’ ‘delusional process,’ ‘paranoid psychosis’—perhaps. But these medical terms suggest a motive that is utterly unfathomable, one that lies solely within the assailant’s sick mind. This semantic field, this choice to interview a psychiatrist rather than, say, a sociologist, reinforces the idea that these are above all aberrant, incomprehensible events. And in a way, they are. But they are also acts embedded in a social and gendered framework, constantly present but rarely acknowledged. Of course, we cannot ‘know’for sure. But if we collectively posed the question more often, maybe we’d get more answers than by brushing it aside.

 

 

Does the media hesitate to use this neologism because we can’t say with certainty that this was a femicide? Caution, caution—very well. But then why do journalists devote so much space to showing off their intellectual flair by examining the influences (‘from Lovelock to Foucault’ as Le Monde puts it) behind the manifesto the assailant sent before his crime? After all, we can say with certainty that the victims had nothing to do with Justin P.’s half-ecological, half-Nazi ideology.

 

 

The murderer is not an intellectual. Or, if he fancies himself as one, the fact remains: he is, above all, a murderer. We are talking about Justin P. today because he cold-bloodedly killed a classmate and attacked three others, not because he published some brilliant revolutionary essay in the literary season. In fact, the manifesto itself exposes his incoherence. What presents itself as a grand, three-part essay (‘I. Globalised Ecocide: The First Aggression,’ ‘II. Systemic Violence and Social Alienation: The Second Aggression,’ ‘III. Totalitarian Social Conditioning: The Third Aggression’) was, by Justin P.’s own admission, patched together using ‘writing sites’, in other words, generative AI. What kind of self-proclaimed eco-activist, supposedly devoted enough to his cause to kill for it, fails to grasp the massive ecological cost of generative AI? How many litres of water? How many litres of blood?

 

 

Who is Justin P., they wonder. Everyone seems fascinated with this solitary and mysterious adolescent who ‘spent his afternoons in the forest playing airsoft,’ who ‘read extensively’. Justin P. is presented as a socially isolated, suicidal, suffering young man who ‘scarred his forehead before committing the act’ (Le Monde). So close to the mark, nearly uttering the word ‘incel,’ journalists lose their nerve. Nothing remains but the pathetic… and one almost feels sympathy.

 

 

The excessive evaluation of the perpetrator in journalistic coverage of femicides is a recurring pattern. According to journalist Laurène Daycard, this stems from a presumption, proven or not, that readers are more interested in knowing ‘who is this man who killed his partner?’ rather than ‘who is this woman killed by her partner?’

 

 

But, precisely, ‘Lorène was not Justin P.’s partner!’ And there you highlight a significant problem in our collective understanding of femicides, as reported in feminist association Nous Toutes‘ annual report on media coverage of gender-based violence. We tend to conjugalise (that is, domesticise) femicide, restricting the concept exclusively to women killed by current or former partners. Yet this contradicts the definition adopted by most feminist organisations: ‘the murder or forced suicide of a woman because of her gender, regardless of age or circumstances. Femicides occur within a context of systemic patriarchal violence and/or at the intersection of other systems of oppression.’ Relationship status is not mentioned.

 

 

Why, then, do we struggle to talk about femicide outside the context of romantic relationships? According to academic Margot Giacinti, today’s media coverage in France inherits two historical paradigms that, while distinct in approach, both serve to downplay gendered violence. During the French Revolution, to preserve the sacred institution of marriage from criminal justice, people spoke of ‘spousal assaults,’ erasing gender asymmetry despite women representing the vast majority of victims. In the 20th century, this evolved into the ‘passion paradigm,’ which, unlike the previously gender-blind approach, implicitly recognised the male-female dynamic, but justified the violence by attributing violence against women to jealousy or madlove.

 

 

In response, feminists have had to repeat, again and again, that one does not kill ‘out of love.’ Thanks to them, our normative view of intimate partner murders has changed. At the same time, these struggles have shaped our descriptive conception of femicide as ‘primarily’ a husband killing his wife. True, 72% of femicide victims are killed by a partner or ex, but the remaining quarter still represents dozens of women every year. Hardly a statistical residue.

 

 

Perhaps it’s simply easier to confine femicide to the marital home. Beyond the historical reasons explaining our contemporary affinity with the word, the Nous Toutes report suggests that focusing only on the 72% of victims also conveniently avoids addressing the full scope of the problem. This offers a certain comfort to public authorities; downplaying the total number of victims allows them to mobilise fewer resources to combat femicides.

 

 

Such cases are often exploited by politicians, less to offer concrete solutions than to shape their public image. Emmanuel Macron’s government is using this to fuel a return-to-order narrative. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has gone on the offensive, denouncing ‘the descent of society into savagery’. This alarmist and dehumanising phrasing, with its animal connotations, feeds the security-focused turn political debates are taking in France, even within the ‘moderate’ majority. The crime in Nantes is, he declared, ‘not just an isolated incident, but a societal issue.’ Ah! And what is the conclusion to be drawn, then? ‘We live in a society that has encouraged laxity, that has sought to deconstruct prohibitions, authority, order, hierarchies, and has given birth to all this violence.’

 

 

Faced with a social fact, why reflect on today’s hierarchies when you can simply long for yesterday’s? Of course, this misses the point: patriarchy creates the conditions in which hundreds of women are murdered every year (including Lorène), and young men are subjected to masculine pressures we know damage their mental health (including Justin P.).

 

 

Mental health, meanwhile, is the fallback theme for politicians less intoxicated by calls for authority—but just as unwilling to take real risks. Johanna Rolland, Socialist Mayor of Nantes, expressed her compassion for the families, deplored the national instrumentalisation of the tragedy, then pointed to ‘fundamental questions’ that should be addressed, particularly ‘the mental health of this country’s youth.’

 

 

This is a textbook example of a political response that paradoxically depoliticises the debate. Youth mental health is undeniably a societal issue, often neglected, and I’d be the first to say public policies fail to address it. But in this case, the appeal to mental health has too much of a safe, consensual aftertaste. Let’s be blunt: Justin P. did not kill himself. And so, invoking mental health as the primary lens obscures the reality of the act. In the case of the Nantes femicide, a preventive or psychological approach alone is not just insufficient: it misrecognises the political nature of the event. Without naming structural violence, the response is weak and cowardly.

 

 

You don’t need to be an expert sociologist to observe certain social regularities. You don’t need to wait for a neologism to crystallise before formulating a hypothesis—one among many, all equally uncertain. But it does take a bit of courage from journalists trained on these issues to circulate the words that matter.

 

 

And the public, too, carries a share of the responsibility. It’s already mainstream to cry while watching Adolescence; it’s easy to recommend this ‘truly cutting’ series to anyone who will listen. But where is that tearful crowd once the series ends? The most observant will remind me that the word ‘femicide’ barely comes up in Adolescence. The rest of us will keep waiting for the credits to roll.∎

 

Words by Prune Fargetton. Image courtesy Pcappelaere via Wikimedia Commons.