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It will be now sent immediately to France's Constitutional Council watchdog, which has a month to confirm its legality.

Another challenge is possible at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where decisions are binding.

There are estimated to be only about 2,000 women wearing the full veil in France.

The bill makes it illegal to wear garments such as the niqab or burka, which incorporate a full-face veil, anywhere in public.

It envisages fines of 150 euros (£119) for women who break the law and 30,000 euros and a one-year jail term for men who force their wives to wear the burka.

The niqab and burka are widely seen in France as threats to women's rights and the secular nature of the state.

The bill is also seen as a touchstone for the Mr Sarkozy administration's policy of integration. It is grappling with disaffected immigrant communities as it seeks to prevent a repeat of the mass unrest of 2005 on run-down French housing estates.

In March, the Council of State, France's highest administrative body, warned that the law could be found unconstitutional.

"A complete ban on the covering of the face would violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who wear the burqa or the niqab in public as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's expert on discrimination in Europe.

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"Why should we find ourselves returning to medieval traditions?" asks Andre Gerin, the Communist member of parliament who chaired the parliamentary commission.

"To me, the full veil, the covered face, it's a woman in a portable coffin." It was Mr Gerin who first started speaking openly about banning the veil when, as mayor of a suburb of Lyon, he says he noticed more and more women wearing it. And he is convinced they are doing it at the behest of what he calls fundamentalists. "These women are controlled," the MP says.

Kenza Drider scoffs at any such notion. Relaxing on a bench in the park in Avignon, the mother of four young children explains how she bought her niqab nearly 11 years ago and did not tell her husband until she put it on to go out shopping with him one day.

"He knew very well it wasn't up to him whether I went out like that," she says, recalling that he merely said "OK, let's go", and she has worn the niqab ever since. And she says that for women who wear the niqab in France, the majority of them French-born and many of them converts to Islam, "it's a personal decision, it's their freedom" to do as they wish.

Secular tradition

But the arguments against the niqab are not just based on feminism and the status of women.

The niqab, says leading feminist philosopher Elizabeth Badinter "is totally contrary to the three principles of the French Republic". Those principles - liberty, equality, fraternity - can be seen written or carved on the front of every French town hall. By hiding your face, Mrs Badinter explains as she sips a small black coffee in her elegant apartment in Paris, you breach the principle of equality. "She who hides her face is in a position superior to mine," she says. "She sees me but she refuses to reciprocate."

Then there is the strongly guarded idea of secularism in France, the absolute separation of religion and the state rooted in the 1789 revolution and enshrined in a century-old law. "You can have whatever religion you wish," says Mrs Badinter, "but it stays in the private sphere." The problem is that some French Muslims see that not only as a way of dismissing their religion but also of ignoring their presence in France.

For the foreigners who come to France, according to Kenza Drider, "it's not that they don't want to integrate, it's that the state doesn't want to integrate them - there's a big difference". She, like many Muslims, accuses the government of failing to address the social and economic problems the newcomers face.

And she has a message for the members of parliament who want to stop her wearing her veil in certain public places. She will not comply. "The MPs who talk about liberty, equality and fraternity don't really understand the French Republic," she says back at her apartment in Avignon where, with only family and other women present, she removes the niqab and sets about making dinner for her children.

"Liberty means freedom of conscience, of expression," she says. "Equality means not judging the foreigner and fraternity means the support of French people for a French citizen."

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