Until recently, Maryam Pougetoux, 19, was an ordinary student at Paris IV, one of the Sorbonne’s campuses, where she studies literature. She is president of the local chapter of France’s student union, UNEF—an important institution in France. She is also Muslim, and wears a hijab.

On May 12, Pougetoux appeared on French television channel M6 to discuss some of the protests the student union has been organizing over the country’s educational system. Within an hour, Laurent Bouvet, a political scientist and self-proclaimed public intellectual, posted a screenshot of Pougetoux’s interview on his Facebook page. “At UNEF, [the intersectional fight against discrimination] is well underway. The president of the UNEF says so,” he wrote sarcastically—a jab at a concept embraced by certain French activist circles but overwhelmingly rejected by the country’s mainstream. Shortly thereafter, essayist Celine Pina wrote on Facebook that Pougetoux exemplified the Muslim Brotherhood’s “infiltration of student unions,” perverting their history of advocating for women’s rights.

The posts went viral, unleashing a national controversy that has dragged on since, dominating media coverage and even eliciting response from top government officials. Pougetoux—who was even caricatured for a new issue of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—has become the latest subject of France’s ongoing and intensifying battle over national identity.

You might expect, given their rejection of the hijab, that Bouvet and Pina belong to the far right. Yet in the battle over how to accommodate France’s Muslim population, the largest in Europe, a certain faction of the left has been among the most vocal in embracing a hardline Republicanism and restrictive vision of secularism that separates religion from public life—a narrow, and some argue flawed, interpretation of what the French call laïcité.

Laïcité is rooted in a memory of the French Revolution, when the Catholic Church acted as an anti-revolutionary, pro-monarchy force. Eventually, this sense of secularism as a central principle of any French republic led to the 1905 law that separates Church and State, mandating state neutrality toward religions and the religious neutrality of public employees. But since the 1980s, many politicians and intellectuals have reinterpreted laïcité to confine all displays of religion to the private sphere. A 2004 law that bans conspicuous religious signs in public schools exemplified that shift. The country likes to see itself as a colorblind community defined by political citizenship, not ethnicity or religion, and scoffs at “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism.” Students’ display of their religious identities could lead to proselytizing and interfere with the school’s ability to transmit Republican values, the 2004 law’s architects argued. While this law doesn’t apply to university students like Pougetoux, her critics have drawn on its theoretical underpinnings.