When Aïcha Tabbakhe, a French nurse, went to fill out the forms for her children’s school dinners in her small town outside Paris, she was puzzled. The box she would usually tick to say that her Muslim children didn’t eat pork wasn’t there. “Confused, I called the town hall and I was bluntly told: ‘From now on, that’s the way it is,’” she said. “Pork or nothing.”

After years of French controversies over headscarves, pork has become the new battleground in the nation’s uneasy debate over national identity and the place of Islam. Bacon and sausage school dinners are being used by rightwing politicians to hammer home what it means to be French. Court battles and vicious political spats have erupted as protesters warn that controversial menu changes are sending a message to Muslim or Jewish children that to be truly French, they must eat roast pork. Politicians, as they go to war over the ham on school dinner plates, are fighting about the true meaning of French secularism and whether it has been hijacked and twisted by the right in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.

Tabbakhe’s home town of Chilly-Mazarin – a town of about 20,000 people in L’Essonne, which nudges up against Orly airport to the south of Paris – is the latest of several run by rightwing mayors to announce they will scrap pork-free options in school canteens in the name of secularism. For 30 years, Chilly-Mazarin has provided non-pork alternatives to Muslim and Jewish children. But from November, that will stop. On days when the menu features dishes such as roast pork with mustard and courgette gratin, or Strasbourg sausage and organic lentils, or ham pasta bake, children whose families don’t eat pork for religious reasons will be offered nothing but the side dishes. The new mayor, Jean-Paul Beneytou, from Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party, says this is a commonsense way to preserve public sector “neutrality”. But many parents, teachers and leftwing opposition politicians call it a deliberate stigmatisation of Islam that is cruel to children by playing politics with school lunches.

“It’s the impact on the children that has been the hardest,” says Tabbakhe. “My four-year-old daughter is too young to understand that she doesn’t eat pork. It’s not something she’s aware of and it’s not something we talk about. What am I supposed to tell her now? We tried to subtly tell her we didn’t eat pork at home. But she thought ‘pork’ was a type of dessert. She said, ‘Yes, I do eat it, it’s delicious.’ That would be funny if it wasn’t such an awful situation. She is totally confused and has picked up on the atmosphere. She’s crying at school and says she doesn’t want to eat at the canteen. My nine-year-old son went door to door with a parents’ association petition against this and got lots of signatures from non-Muslim parents who were upset. He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I won’t eat it.’ He shouldn’t have to be worrying about this. School is supposed to be about learning and living together, not about this. Now my nine-year-old is starting to ask, ‘Why am I different?’”

Tabbakhe takes off her headscarf every morning to go to work because by law, French public-sector workers, including hospital staff, must be seen as neutral and cannot show religious belief with an outward symbol. “That is the law, so I do it. But this isn’t the law,” she says.

In the past eight months, decisions by some rightwing mayors to end pork-free school meals – with the full support of the former president Sarkozy – have sparked outrage, petitions and court battles. School canteens in France are run by town halls, which are free to make their own rules. Unlike in the UK, French state schools do not offer halal or kosher meat. Muslim or Jewish children who stay for lunch eat the same meat as everyone else. But on days where pork is served, a large number of town halls offer substitutes, such as a turkey sausage. Other towns offer vegetarian options. There has never been a big movement to demand halal or kosher meat in France – children who eat only halal or kosher either go home for lunch or attend private faith schools. But now controversy has gripped France.

Children who don’t eat pork will have to do without a main course on days when it is served. Photograph: Jacques LOIC/Photononstop/Corbis

At the heart of the row over pork is the French principle of secularism, or laïcité, and whether it has been twisted for political gain. The French republic is built on a strict separation of church and state, intended to foster equality for all private beliefs. In theory, the state is neutral in terms of religion and allows everyone the freedom to practise their faith as long as there is no threat to public order. Since January’s terrorist attacks – in which French Islamic extremists left 17 dead after the shootings at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris – laïcité has been repeatedly used by political parties as a catch-all answer to society’s ills. After the attacks, the socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, said secularism was now “the only issue that matters”. Since then, the word has been used so often as a mantra by the government and politicians that a panel of linguists recently voted it “word of the year”.

Once a rallying cry of the left, secularism has now been appropriated by the right, and even the far-right Front National, as part of a debate on national identity – used to rail against anything seen as not French, and particularly to target and exclude Islam from the public sphere. It is a principle meant to protect pluralism, but the sociologist François Dubet recently warned that “talking about secularism has [now] become a way to claim a white Christian France, where everyone shares the same values and traditions, a way to say we don’t want Muslims”.

Jean-Louis Bianco, who heads national consulting body the Observatory of Secularism, has warned that the scrapping of pork-free school dinners is a “typical” example of secularism being used for political ends. “Why create a problem where there isn’t a problem?” he asked.

“Nowhere does French secularism declare that people must eat the same, dress the same, drink the same,” says Valentine Zuber, a historian of religion and international relations at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. “That is a distortion of the principle of laïcité.” She warns that secularism has come to be used as a principle of exclusion to somehow save France from cultural mixing, “when that is not what it means at all”.

Chilly-Mazarin does not suffer social tension. It has a pretty town hall, quiet streets and less than 20% social housing. A large population from north Africa moved there after the second world war as France shed its colonies. Many found work in the building boom when the town was bisected by a major motorway to Paris. Residents stress that everyone gets on well. Last year, the socialist mayor was ousted by Les Républicains. Outside the sports hall, a publicity pillar is plastered with posters for the Front National, reading “This is our country” – a reminder of the rise of Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration party and the hardening tone of public debate as other politicians court her voters.

One local headteacher, who doesn’t want to be named, says: “Secularism is not about pork. It is about respecting others’ religion; it is not about saying ‘no more religion’. The ban on pork-free meals is extremely difficult for me and my teachers. School is about teaching children to respect each other, regardless of difference. This has demolished our teaching of that in class.”

“My eight-year-old son told me: ‘Mummy, the mayor wants me to eat pork,’” says Amina Ben Bouzian, a childminder. Beneytou, the mayor, says there will be no negative impact on children. “We serve pork three times a month. I don’t think this will perturb the health of a child.” He says he took the decision in the interests of “living together”, that it is important that everyone be served “the same” food and not be set apart by being offered a different meal.

A city council meeting in Chalon-sur-Saône over the end of pork-free options in schools. Photograph: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this year, when another Sarkozy-backed mayor, Gilles Platret, scrapped pork-free options in the Burgundy town of Chalon-sur-Saône, the Muslim Judicial Defence League took him to court. The group’s lawyer, Karim Achoui, says: “A child would be extremely traumatised if a pork cutlet was served to him and he was obliged to eat it after he has been repeatedly told from a young age that it is forbidden food.” The group’s first case failed, but it has lodged a new legal challenge that will be heard in court on 19 October.

“I’m not an enemy of religion, but religious belief is private and the public service should be secular and neutral,” Platret says. “We welcome all children. We don’t force them to eat what they don’t want to eat. We don’t oblige any Muslim child to eat pork. When a child doesn’t eat a dish, whether for religious reasons or not, the dinner ladies watch out for that child and give them more of whatever else is on the menu – the starter or vegetables – so they don’t go hungry.”

But Platret, who after the Charlie Hebdo attacks was promoted to vice-president of the working group on secularism in the Association of Mayors of France, adds: “The question of pork is symbolic, but it has gone beyond that.” He believes that secularism will be a key issue for the presidential race in 2017, because French society is “searching for itself” and “asking how it can integrate immigrant populations”.

Sarkozy, as he courts far-right voters in his bid to return to the presidency in 2017, fully backs the scrapping of pork-free school dinner options in the name of secularism. “If you want your children to have eating habits based on religion, go to a private faith school,” he said on French TV. But his party is bitterly divided. Rachida Dati, the country’s first Muslim woman to hold a major government post, grew up on the outskirts of Chalon-sur-Saône and has condemned the row as “a non-topic that will drive a wedge through France”. The rightwing senator François Grosdidier has warned: “When you force a child to eat a dish that contravenes their religious or cultural beliefs, the child doesn’t eat it. You are depriving that child of food for political reasons.” The socialist education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who was born into a Muslim family in rural Morocco before moving to France aged four, has denounced the scrapping of pork-free options as “a way to ban certain children from accessing the canteen”.

MEP Rachida Dati, who has condemned the row over pork. Photograph: Magali Delporte/Guardian

It is not the first time pork has been used to make a political point in France. In 2010, there was controversy over extreme-right groups’ attempts to hold “pork and wine aperitifs”, which they deliberately planned to stage near Muslim places of worship before authorities banned them. A so-called “republican aperitif”, with tables laden with sausage and wine, was held in central Paris by extreme-right groups saying they were against halal meat and wanted to defend secularism.

Last month, as Muslims celebrated Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, the Front National mayor of Hayange en Moselle, Fabien Engelmann, tweeted pictures of himself petting sheep he said had been rescued from the Muslim celebrations and were being taken to an animal sanctuary.

For hardliners on the French right, meat is politics. In the last presidential election campaign in 2012, as Sarkozy battled to remain president before losing to the socialist François Hollande, he deliberately stoked fears about the Islamisation of the nation’s dinner plates. He seized on a row begun by Le Pen over whether halal meat was being sold on the wider market to unsuspecting non-Muslim consumers. The row started when Le Pen wrongly claimed that 100% of meat in the Paris region was halal.

This was not Sarkozy’s only venture into divisive identity politics. He recently said that, “in the name of secularism”, there should be a ban on the Muslim headscarf being worn by students at universities, a comment that again sparked criticism in his own party. In 2004, France banned girls from wearing veils in state schools – and all other religious symbols, such as crosses or turbans. But recent cases of girls being turned away for wearing long black skirts have exposed tensions over discrimination and schools going further than the law. Earlier this year, a 15-year-old girl was twice banned from class in Charleville-Mézières for wearing a long black skirt considered to be too “ostentatiously” religious, sparking the hashtag #JePorteMaJupeCommeJeVeux (“I wear my skirt as I please”).

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, who backs the scrapping of pork-free options. Photograph: Keystone USA-Zuma/Rex Features

According to the CCIF Islamophobia watchdog, at least 130 students have been turned away from class since 2014 for outfits deemed too openly religious – mainly long black skirts. Its spokesman, Yasser Louati, says: “This showed a hysteria targeting Muslims, which is not good for society as a whole.” He says of the pork school meals issue: “It is a deliberate new policy taken by the right to keep up public debate around national identity issues in France. I was born and raised here, and until recently I had never heard of a problem with different school meal options for Muslim and Jewish children who don’t eat pork.”

Back in Chilly-Mazarin, Anouar Briki, who works in construction and was born in Nice, is pondering what to tell his two daughters, aged six and nine, about how to deal with the end of pork-free meals in the canteen. “I’ll have to explain all this in a way that is not shocking to them,” he says. “Until now, they’ve always just eaten normally with their friends, but now they will have to put up their hand and say: ‘No, we can’t eat the same thing.’ We’re not even asking for halal. Parents just want their children to eat a meal that is not pork.”

Why does he think there is so much fuss about it? “Maybe politicians think French identity is linked to pork. But French identity is about so much more than that. And anyway, according to surveys, France’s favourite dish is couscous. So let’s not make up culinary divisions where there are none.”

What’s on the menu?

Sample menus for state school lunches in Chilly-Mazarin [with non-pork alternatives that will disappear from November].

Tuesday 13 October

Starter: Pork liver mousse and cornichon pickle [or chicken pâté] with navette (Marseille orange-flower biscuit)

Main course: Organic blanquette de veau (veal stew), rice

Dessert: Organic apple

Thursday 15 October

Starter: Potted salmon and Swedish bread

Main course: Roast pork [or turkey ham], peas and carrots in yoghurt sauce

Dessert: Banana

Thursday 22 October

Starter: Green salad with vinaigrette dressing

Main course: Tartiflette (a traditional Alpine gratin of potato mixed with bacon and reblochon cheese) [or pork-free tartiflette]

Dessert: Natural yoghurt, low-sugar apple and vanilla compote