The teenage girl of African and Polish origin chosen to be this year's Joan of Arc at the city of Orléans' annual celebration of the French icon has come under attack from outraged far-right trolls on social media, reports The Telegraph.
Mathilde Edey Gamassou will be at the centre of the week-long event that starts late April, during which she will parade through the town on horseback, kitted out in medieval armour and brandishing a sword.
The French have for the past 600 years feted the peasant girl-turned-war commander as a national heroine for helping drive the English out of France.
But Joan of Arc is particularly venerated by the French far-right as a symbol of national resistance, and every year Front National leaders place a wreath at her statue in Paris at the start of their traditional May Day parade.
The announcement earlier this week that Ms Gamassou, whose father is from Benin and whose mother is Polish, from among 250 girls in Orléans to depict Joan of Arc was met with a flurry of angry posts on Twitter and on far-right websites.
"Next year, she [Joan of Arc] will be in a burqa," was the headline of an article on anti-Muslim site Résistance Républicaine.
“Joan of Arc was not of mixed race, she’s white. Stop changing history and imposing multiculturalism on us,” said a tweet typical of a flood of posts lamenting that a part-black person could be picked to play the Catholic saint who was burned at the stake.
Gender equality minister Marlène Schiappa also stepped into the row to defend the 17-year-old Ms Gamassou who is in her last year in school.
"The racist hatred of fascists has no place in the French republic," she tweeted.