Such gestures are also fuelling the rise of new far-Right figures such as Eric Zemmour, an abrasive newspaper columnist who last month declared his candidacy for April’s presidential elections. Dubbed the “French Donald Trump”, he has declared war on aggressive minority campaigners, and was photographed last month exchanging middle-finger gestures with a protester in Marseille. The image, splashed over newspapers worldwide, summed up the fractious national mood.

As Mr Rykner points out, there are no “saints” on either side. Yet if there is one person in France whose halo risks being tarnished by this debate, it is President Emmanuel Macron, who swept power in 2017 as a Gallic Tony Blair. Elected on a ticket to unite Left and Right, he combines economic liberalism with Left-wing social attitudes. But in the culture wars, there is no such thing as a neutral centre-ground, and to critics, Macron’s globalist outlook does not make him the most obvious defender of French cultural heritage.

True, in the wake of the worldwide protests over the death of George Floyd last year, he struck a firm tone, saying France “will not forget any of her works. She will not debunk statues.” At the same time, though, he has referred to France’s colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity”, and called for the need to “deconstruct our history to get rid of racism”. For those who see Macron as just another paid-up member of the Davos Club elite, this is precisely the kind of double-speak that allows woke culture to take root in museums and campuses.

Hence the petition over the tapestries in the French Academy, which followed objections from some of the academy’s resident artists that they represented an “imperialist” artistic heritage which celebrated colonialism and slavery. That then sparked a critical article in La Tribune de l’Art by Jérôme Delaplanche, the academy’s former head of art history, who views such objections as “puritanism”. When approached by the Telegraph, the academy referred to comments that its current director, Sam Stourdzé, gave to  Le Figaro last month, in which he said the tapestries were due to be removed as part of planned restoration works, but that there would be a “discussion” on their future.

Delaplanche, though, fears where that discussion will go. “The academy renovation,” he tells me, “could be an excuse to justify removing the tapestries altogether to satisfy this woke madness”.