French residents of Rouen were on Monday invited to vote on what to do with a statue of Napoleon Bonaparte outside the town hall after the Left-wing mayor’s proposal to replace it with the likeness of a modern feminist sparked nationwide accusations of wokeism.

Conservatives in the Normandy capital and around the country were up in arms when Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, 44, a Socialist elected last year, proposed in September to get rid of the four-tonne bronze effigy of the emperor on horseback by the sculptor Vital Gabriel Dubray.

The mayor suggested replacing the statue, which has been a city landmark since 1865, by one of Gisèle Halimi, a French-Tunisian feminist and lawyer who died last year aged 93, in the name of gender diversity.

“I do not see why the most visible and symbolic public spaces, like the town hall, should be reserved for men,” he said, adding that Joan of Arc – who the English burned at the stake there – was the only woman whose name was given pride of place in the streets or Rouen.

The row touched on the controversial legacy of the early 19th-century conqueror. The bicentenary of his death this year has prompted heated debate over whether he should be remembered as a military mastermind who gave France its grandeur and civil code or a brutal despot and one of the world’s “worst misogynists” who reinstated slavery in the land of human rights.

A “hands off my statue” petition released by a conservative student association in Rouen has garnered 21,000 signatures. It warns: “Step by step, ‘wokeism’ is advancing in France.”

Christian Estrosi, the right-wing mayor of Nice, has offered to take the statue, which has been absent from its site for a €200,000 makeover for over a year.

Eric Ciotti, runner up in the Right-wing Republicans party presidential nomination contest last weekend, called it “wokeism and the deconstruction of our identity in action”.

In light of the uproar, the Rouen mayor opened a public consultation on the matter.

On Monday, he launched an online vote on “the role of women in the public space” and what to do with the Napoleon statue open only to local residents. The results will be announced next week.

“This is obviously not about toppling the statue of Napoleon nor hiding it or revising history but asking questions about its future location and above all about the opportunity it offers us to give women a more prominent place in our town hall square,” he wrote.

The mayor has previously suggested moving the statue to a less central spot in Rouen.