The role of Islam in French society has emerged as a key battleground in the presidential election campaign, leaving many French Muslims uneasy over the bursts of rhetoric against the nation's largest religious minority.
Far-right candidates Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (RN) and especially the former pundit Eric Zemmour have railed against Islam in frequent diatribes invoking security and terrorism risks.
Their messages are sometimes echoed by officials on the conservative right and allies of centrist President Emmanuel Macron, with their warnings on radical Islamism.
Such a fierce campaign debate about Islam would be less conceivable in neighbours like Britain and Germany, which also both have large Muslim minorities.
France, however, still lives in the shadow of the trauma of Algeria's War of Independence and, more recently, the jihadist massacres of 2015.
Zemmour, who is contending with Le Pen and the traditional rightwing candidate Valerie Pecresse to reach a second round run-off against Macron, caused a fresh outcry on Monday by describing the town of Roubaix in northern France as "Afghanistan two hours from Paris."
He told France Inter Radio: "French people who are Muslims must live in the French way and not consider that sharia law is superior to the laws of the republic."
The official division of church and state in France in 1905 left secularism as one of the cornerstones of the modern republic's identity.
'Deep scars'
The end of colonial rule prompted large migration flows into France in the 1950s and 1960s, but the economic crisis that hit in the 1970s saw many of the newcomers stuck without work in housing developments soon abandoned by the middle class.
While Britain and Germany also grappled with large postwar migrant arrivals, no other European colonial power fought a war whose ferocity, duration and consequences can compare with the Algerian War of Independence.
"The migration issue is particularly present in France because it awakens the difficult memory of the Algerian war," political scientist Pascal Perrineau told AFP.
This "left deep scars in the collective consciousness," he said.
'Chasing public opinion'
Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who made it to the second round in the 2002 presidential vote, has shocked much of France with repeated broadsides against Islam and immigrants.
French Muslims fear that such rhetoric has now been normalized and increasingly supported by widespread news reports and saturation of social media.
"I feel bad, very bad," said Khadija, 38, a social worker in the Loiret region in central France, who asked that her second name be withheld.
"I have the impression that today's France spits on my grandparents, who fought to liberate it, on my parents who came to build its roads, and on me, who has respected all the rules of democracy and integration.
