“In France, it clearly backfires,” said Jeffrey Reitz, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto whose comparative research examines Muslim immigration in France and Canada. “Many young Muslim women feel an underlying resentment. They have to take off the headscarf when they get to school, but they put it back on immediately when they leave, feeling that it’s an important way to defend their identity. Some of them do this despite their parents encouraging them to get rid of the scarf and get a job. This is a case of ‘reactive ethnicity’—when you have a policy to ban a practice, so people continue it in protest.”

Reitz, whose research examines employment as one measure of assimilation, said the survey data show that for Muslim women born in France, the employment rate is 10-15 percent lower than for other French women. By contrast, “multiculturalism actually works well as an assimilationist tool,” Reitz said. In relatively multicultural Quebec, the employment rate for second-generation Muslim women is the same as for Anglo-Canadian women. In other words, by this measure, the female Muslim population assimilates to the mainstream standard.

“Laïcité is being perceived in Quebec as the magical solution to every identity problem,” said Valérie Amiraux, a sociology professor at the University of Montreal. “But forcing people to turn into someone they are not can’t work”—and there is no evidence from France to suggest that it does work. What surveys of attitudes toward Muslims do show, Amiraux noted, is a strong correlation between highly publicized legislation banning Muslim symbols in public spaces—such as France’s 2004 headscarf law—and an increase in Islamophobia.

Laïcité remains popular in France, however. And Le Pen has capitalized on her country’s longstanding secularist tradition to campaign as its defender against outside threats. Recent polls show her on track to lead the first round of voting in the upcoming presidential election (though she is expected to lose in the second round in May). Even some French Jews have been turning out in support of her National Front party, despite its notorious anti-Semitic past.

Sarah Hammerschlag, a scholar at the University of Chicago who focuses on the position of Judaism in France’s post-World War II intellectual scene, said the trend is likely to continue this spring. “There are probably a lot of Jews who are going to vote for Le Pen,” she predicted, “because the threat of Muslim anti-Semitism is seen to be the largest and most dangerous threat for Jewish communities in France. That threat makes her promises seem tantalizing.”

Paradoxically, that perceived threat may be driving Jews into the arms of a historically anti-Semitic party whose leader is now asking the Jews themselves to give up their own religious attachments. And the history of French Jews shows that this type of assimilationist effort doesn’t always work in expected ways.