Noelisme

2006subcultureclassic

Published September 10, 2026

Noelisme is a French internet subculture that grew out of the jeuxvideo.com forums in 2006, built around a Christmas-hat smiley and a shared vernacular of inside jokes. What started as one user spamming a :noel: emoticon on a teen forum grew into a rowdy online movement blamed for raids, forum wars, and moral panic in the French press.

internet memes

Overview

Noelisme is best understood as a French-language forum tribe rather than a single image or catchphrase. Its members, called Noelistes, share a vernacular of inside jokes, a mascot smiley with a Christmas hat, and a habit of coordinated pile-ons against users they mock as 'kikoolol', 'kikoo' or 'pyj'1. Observers have compared the group to a French juvenile version of Anonymous or the Chinese 'human flesh search engine', a comparison rooted in the group's raid tactics against blogs and other websites1.

The culture is defined less by a template than by a set of running bits: worship of Chuck Norris as a deity, ritual forum wars against a rival faction called the Hapistes (who used a competing :happy: smiley), and a taste for satire that produced parody sites like Noelshack (an ImageShack knockoff), Noelbook, Noelpedia and Noelfica1. The tone swings between absurdist humor and genuine harassment, which is why French coverage of the group was so mixed.

Origin & Background

Platform
jeuxvideo.com (forum origin)
Creator
Triplepatte
Date
2006

Noelisme began on jeuxvideo.com, a French gaming portal with an old-style age-segmented forum system, in 20061. The specific birthplace was the 'Bla-Bla 15-18 ans' board for teenagers aged 15 to 18, where a user known as Triplepatte began stamping every one of his posts with one of the site's built-in emoticons: a small face wearing a Christmas hat, coded as :noel: (from Noël, the French word for Christmas)1.

Other posters latched onto the smiley and turned it into a group identity. The movement took the name Noelisme from that emoticon code, and its followers styled themselves Noelistes1. From the start the group defined itself in opposition to another camp on the same forum, the Hapistes, who rallied around the :happy: smiley (translated from French)1.

How It Spread

How to Use This Meme

Being a Noeliste typically meant signing posts with the :noel: smiley, dropping Chuck Norris references, and using the group's slang against outsiders. The common convention on jeuxvideo.com forums was to mock newer or younger users as 'kikoolol' and to escalate disputes with rival factions into full forum wars rather than one-off replies1.

Frequently Asked Questions