Mr Macron, 44, has sought to capitalise on the issue, which critics argue is part of a wider push to stigmatise millions of French Muslims that includes outlawing ritual slaughter, which would restrict French Muslims’ and Jews’ access to kosher and halal meat.

On a trip to Le Havre, northern France on Thursday, he said: “There is no country in the world where the headscarf is banned in public. Do you want to be the first?”

“Under the constitution, if she bans the veil, she’ll have to ban the kippa, the cross and other religious symbols,” he said.

This week in Strasbourg, a veiled young woman asked him whether he was a feminist to which he responded “yes” and asked her if she wore the garment by choice. “Totally by choice,” came the reply.

“Her response is the best response to all this rubbish that I hear,” he said in a nod to his rival.

However, the centrist has also been taken to task over his government’s treatment of French Muslims, with some saying his law against Islamist “separatism” has stoked wider anti-Islam sentiment.

On France Info on Friday, a woman in a Muslim headscarf told him she had felt insulted by Mr Macron’s previous comments where he suggested that headscarves destabilise relations between men and women.

French women “have been castigated these recent years for a simple scarf, without any leader deigning to denounce this injustice”, said the woman, Sara El Attar.

Macron sought to defend his record. “For me personally, the question of the headscarf is not an obsession,” he said.

He said he had no intention of going any further than the current laws on secularism, namely “no headscarf in schools” but “for the rest, it’s a free society.”

The issue could prove a vote winner ahead of the April 24 runoff as the two rivals fight to woo the electorate of Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came third last Sunday on almost 22 per cent.

Some 69 per cent of French Muslims voted Mélenchon, according to an Ifop poll in La Croix.