William Deligny was a skinhead in the 1980s, before “overdosing on violence” and changing his lifestyle to become a Hindu monk within the Gaudiya Vaishnava Congregation in Saint-Étienne du Rouvray.

This attack is just awful, but I can’t say I’m entirely surprised, because violence is the skinhead’s way of life. It is at the root of their beliefs – it is exhibited in the way they dress, in everything they try to convey about themselves.

The attack on Clément Méric is fairly typical of the cowardly behaviour of skinheads: they only fight when they know they are in a position of strength. In this case, the two groups were about equal in size, but the skinheads knew that they were far better equipped to fight than the anti-fascism activists. The skinheads are guided by clear rule: they are not allowed to lose. So, they’ll always escalate the violence: if someone resists, they’ll take out weapons, call in back-up, and so on. Attacks always end with the skinheads dispersing and running away, to later meet up somewhere else.

“Leftist activists are skinheads’ natural enemies”

Ganging up to attack someone is a key aspect of the skinheads’ group mentality. The type of person who joins this movement is very often a distressed, lost person, living at the margin of society, who rejects their family and is looking for something to anchor them. They are deeply frustrated people, who believe their frustration comes not from within but is caused by others. They create enemies to make sense of their own frustrations, which breeds violence. The movement’s leaders reject those who don’t know how to fight, and so violence becomes a way of life. When I was a skinhead, I found it thrilling to beat someone to a pulp; to see them lying on the ground, unconscious.

This descent into violence is largely the result of ignorance. About 90% of skinheads don’t know why they hate people different from them, but hate they do. This hate is particularly strong for far-left activists: they are also extremists; they too seek a world where everyone thinks like them. Leftist activists are the skinheads’ natural enemies.

This hatred of leftists has only increased over the last two decades. Initially, skinheads weren’t necessarily very political; they were mostly a counter-culture. The movement reacted to the rise of “skinhead hunters” toward the end of the 1980s by latching on to far-right ideas, notably under the guidance of Serge Ayoub.