President Nicolas Sarkozy's racially-tinged security crackdown has begun to cause concern even within his own right-wing camp and raise fears that he has damaged France's international image.
Every day French police raid more Gypsy settlements, rounding up hundreds of foreign-born Roma for expulsion, using tactics that one member of Sarkozy's ruling party compared to those of France's Nazi-era collaboration.
The crackdown on illegal Gypsy campsites comes alongside planned measures to strip some foreign-born criminals of their citizenship, after the government made an explicit link between immigration and crime.
Sarkozy hopes such draconian tactics will restore his flagging popularity with French voters in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, but the harsh tone has raised eyebrows even among some politicians of the right.
The policy of dismantling illegal camps has taken an ugly turn," said Jean-Pierre Grand, a lawmaker from Sarkozy's majority UMP, after police rounding up Gypsies were seen separating men from women and children.
Grand used the loaded term "rafle" -- "a round-up" -- to describe the raids, implicitly linking them to France's wartime detention of Jewish citizens.
Another UMP deputy, Bernard Debre, wrote in the daily Le Monde on Tuesday to warn against drawing a straight line between immigration and crime.
"I wouldn't be right to link everything: integration, religion, terrorism and foreigners coming to France. There are French terrorists, there are French criminals," he wrote.
"Obviously, we need a reasonable immigration policy and integration policy.
Let us be wary of taking too easy a shortcut," he warned.
On the Left, while the main opposition Socialist Party has been wary of being drawn into a debate on law and order with a president who has usually made the issue a vote-winner, criticism has been more harsh.
The Green Euro-MP and likely presidential candidate Eva Joly accused Sarkozy of pursuing a policy of "state racism" and described the president's singling out of Roma and foreign-born citizens as "very fascist".
"France is not a racist country," Le Monde editorialist Eric Fottorino wrote in an angry front page article Tuesday. "But by activating racist impulses, the government hurts our principles and our values."
The government's campaign has also drawn fire abroad. Earlier this month the United Nations' anti-discrimination watchdog denounced what it said was "a notable resurgence in racism and xenophobia" in France.
The influential US daily The New York Times has accused Sarkozy of "fanning dangerous anti-immigrant passions for short-term political gain."
In Bulgaria, to where many of the Roma will be deported, commentator Svetoslav Terziev in the Sega newspaper attacked what he called "the biggest official deportation in Europe since World War II."
Meanwhile a video making the rounds of the Internet and international broadcasters has caused further outrage.
It shows French police manhandling African-born women with babies on their backs at a protest in Paris.
Sarkozy's supporters have dismissed the complaints as stemming from elitist political correctness that ignores the fears that native-born French voters have of violent crime spreading from immigrant neighbourhoods.
They still hope Sarkozy can repeat his success of 2007 and persuade voters tempted by the unabashedly anti-immigration National Front to stick with a mainstream right-wing leader with a tough law and order message.
But they have been stung by the ferocity of the reaction.
Immigration Minister Eric Besson expressed outrage on Tuesday that the Gypsy round-up had been compared to French atrocities of World War II, "the industrial, systematic extermination of Jews and Gypsies.”
"People are arrested, the identity is checked, we give them money to return to their homeland. Someone should explain how that is linked to the round-ups of World War II," he protested on RTL radio.