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The public hearing was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start.

The first speaker was a union representative who read out a prepared statement condemning the debate as a right-wing electoral ploy. The moderator interrupted her. “No political speeches,” he called out and strode into the audience and ripped the paper from her hand.

The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France.”

Then a black high-school student, the daughter of immigrants, stood up. Her father was born in Guinea when that Muslim West African country was ruled by France. Her grandfather fought in the French colonial army during the Second World War.

“I want to know,” she said, looking around the room, “who would dare say that I am not French?”

Scenes like this one in Evry, a working-class city 27 kilometres south of Paris, have been playing out in hundreds of town-hall meetings across the country over the past five weeks as part of an orchestrated debate over how to define the French identity.

In typical top-down fashion, the idea was conceived and hatched in the capital. The government proposed the theme and ordered prefects in each department to hold hearings that are set to run through January, when the results are supposed to be synthesized into national policy.

The debate was billed as a chance for public reflection on shared values, a sort of freewheeling civics lesson on a national scale. But its subtext, from the start, has been whether black and Arab immigrants feel or are seen as French, and its implied message is that the national identity is endangered.

So while there has been much talk of liberty, equality and fraternity, the debate has also become a messy, quarrelsome, immigrant-bashing and frequently anti-Islam collective venting.

“This debate has veered out of control,” said Yazid Sebag, the French Diversity Commissioner.

National identity has long been the rallying cry of the extreme-right National Front party in France that portrays immigrants, and particularly Muslim immigrants, as a threat to native French and European culture.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said an open debate on what it means to be French could undermine the extremists by allowing the French to air their concerns rather than let them fester. “It's a noble debate,” he said this week. “Is there or is there not a problem of integration in our country today? Did I invent the fact that some of our neighbourhoods have become ghettos, that racism is on the rise in others, that violence exists in some areas and that there's no diversity in the French elite?”

Yet critics say the President has opened a Pandora's Box, providing a government-sanctioned forum for xenophobic attacks and putting the sons and daughters of immigrants on the defensive. “Instead of making the French reflect on themselves, it goads them to express their rejection of others,” said Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the newspaper Libération.

Some people have argued that the premise of the debate is false because a nation has principles and ideals, but should leave identity to each individual to define. A number of Muslim leaders have warned that the debate has devolved into a harmful discussion of whether Islam is compatible with French identity, in part because it was launched at the same time that the parliament is considering a ban on the face-covering niqab veil and the Swiss voted to ban minarets.

But others have welcomed the debate, with reservations.

“It's a real theme in the sense that it can ask what unites us, with all our differences,” said Marc Cheb Sun, the editor of the multicultural magazine Respect. “The problem is that the way the question is posed, it makes people like me think that we are always going to have to prove our Frenchness.”

Framing the debate as an exploration of national identity was too limiting, he added. “I have the right, with my multiple origins, to be proud of all my identities,” said Mr. Cheb Sun, who was born in France to an Italian father and Egyptian mother. “We have to transmit the idea that we are all a product of this country's history, including its colonial past and the diversity and fusion of cultures it produced.”

Eric Besson, the Minister of Immigration and National Identity, a post created by Mr. Sarkozy when he was elected in 2007, has framed the debate differently.

The guide he sent to prefects for organizing the public hearings provided a list of questions aimed at getting the discussions moving, most of them suggesting that immigration was the core problem. Among them: Is our republic multicultural? How should we stop illegal immigration? Should we control immigration in order to preserve our national identity? Should adult immigrants be sent to citizenship classes?

Mr. Besson, at one of the debates in Paris last month, wondered out loud if Islam was compatible with the French republic. He said he has decided that it is.

The French have also been uninhibited in their response to the call for debate, with more than 40,000 comments posted in the first month on the government's national identity website. About 6 per cent, according to the Immigration Ministry, were racist or hateful enough to be removed.

The posts that remain run the gamut from quotations from 19th-century French philosophers to rants about immigrants.

“France has become a colony of Africa,” wrote one contributor. To be truly French, wrote another, one must have “French blood” from both parents “and going back several generations.” Others said all schoolchildren should be required to memorize the Marseillaise and to sing it, on pain of punishment, at least once a week.

The public meetings in village halls, cinemas, campuses and auditoriums around the country have generally been more restrained. But they have proved treacherous for public officials.

The mayor of a village in eastern France, population 40, found himself pilloried on national television for his comments about immigrants during a debate in Verdun. “There are already 10 million of them whom we're paying to do nothing,” he said.

Nadine Morano, the junior minister for family affairs, has tried to backtrack for days after she was filmed at another debate advising young French Muslims how to fit in. “What I want,” she said, “is that they love France when they live in this country, they get a job, they not use slang … and not wear their caps back to front.”

But not all the debates have been weighty. A group of comedians called Action Discrète infiltrated a hearing in the town of Troyes, pretending to be average local citizens. One stood up and declared that to be French means to meet challenges, like picking up banana peels from the sidewalk, and to hunt mushrooms in the woods. Another started singing the Marseillaise and was hustled from the room by a police officer.

The point of the debates remains unclear, however. Opposition politicians have accused Mr. Sarkozy of launching them in order to court National Front voters in regional elections next spring. But for some in his right-wing party, the exercise cannot end soon enough. Said François Baroin, a deputy in the National Assembly: “It has stirred up the lowest of instincts.”

Susan Sachs is a writer based in Paris.