This paper investigates the development of a formal model in order to analyse online hate in French corpora. Relevant concepts are identified by exploiting several sources: the cognitive foundations of the appraisal theory, according to which people's emotional response are based on their own evaluative judgments or appraisals of situations, events or objects; a linguistic model of how different kinds of modalities applied to predicative contents are expressed in textual data; several definitions of a hate speech. Based on those inputs, a formal model was developed to describe online hate speech. The model highlights different categories of hate targets and actions, and emphasizes the importance of context for online hate detection.