Mainstream politicians on the right, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy, are calling for veiled women to be barred from universities. Others in Mr. Sarkozy’s party want to see women who cover their faces in public brought up on felony charges. On the left, a small party has pushed for a law stopping veiled women from working in day care centers with government contracts.

Even in President François Hollande’s Socialist government, Pascale Boistard, the junior minister for women’s rights, said in January that she was “not sure that the veil had a place at the university level.”

Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, who noted the high number of attacks on veiled women as an area of particular concern in his 2014 report on France, is critical of what he called the country’s “preoccupation” with Muslim women’s attire.

“It only highlights and stigmatizes them,” he said.

Many French officials defend the anti-veil laws. The ban on full face veils is needed for security reasons, they say, noting that Belgium has a similar ban, and the Netherlands is considering one. They say the ban in schools, prompted by an incident in 1989 when three young girls were sent home from public school for refusing to remove their head scarves, is in pursuit of laïcité. (Skullcaps and large crosses and other ostentatious religious signs were banned too, they point out.)

The concept of laïcité was developed during the French Revolution, and was intended to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the government.

More recently, however, experts say it has become the rallying cry of the right, which has redefined it as a weapon to defend the traditions of French life against what many see as the frightening influence of a growing Muslim population.

Yet, even as there are more and more calls for restrictions on the veil, France’s most recent law, which bars veils that cover the face, has proved problematic. Some question why it ever came into being as experts believe that only a tiny fraction of French Muslims dress that way — no more than 2,000 and perhaps as few as 500, many of them converts.