France faces a rebellion in La Réunion, its Indian Ocean island, after the Miss France beauty pageant tried to sack this year's winner for appearing in provocative photographs.

Many of the 800,000 inhabitants of the island, which is legally part of France, have risen up in support of Valérie Bègue, 22, a business student who won the Miss France 2008 crown two weeks ago.

The trouble began for Ms Bègue, Réunion’s first winner in three decades, on Friday when Entrevue, a Paris magazine, published photographs that she posed for three years ago. They included a picture of her licking yoghurt off a concrete ledge. Another has her floating in a swimming pool on a wooden cross in crucifixion pose, while a third shows her breasts.

The pictures brought down the wrath of Geneviève de Fontenay, 75, the formidable boss of the Miss France organisation for the past two decades. All entrants to the competition have to sign a disclaimer stating that they have never been photographed nude or in compromising positions.

“If she had some courage and a bit of dignity she would say: ‘I’m resigning because I’m not worthy to carry on as Miss France’, Ms Fontenay said.

“I wouldn’t want to be seen touring the provinces with a girl like that. Let her stay in La Réunion.”

Ms Bègue, who received a hero’s welcome last week, said the photographs were taken by a friend for an advertising campaign for Pardon! clothing. They were never published. “I made an error of youth, I admit it,” she said but refused to resign.

Politicians and churchmen have leaped to her defence, accusing Ms Fontenay of racism. Radio Free Dom, the main station on the island, said that it had never received so many telephone calls from indignant listeners. Hundreds of supporters marched through Saint-Denis, the capital, yesterday, and tomorrow recent Miss Réunions are to stage a demonstration. Support has also come from Didier Robert, the island MP, and Nassimah Dindar, president of the Réunion Département Council.

Bishop Gilbert Aubry, the leader of the Roman Catholic church on the island, also backed Ms Bègue. He acknowledged that the pictures were “insulting” to Christians, but said: “Valérie is a victim who needs support. It is not up to me to pardon her, she has not offended me.”

At one point during the 2008 competition all contestants had paraded before the judges wearing bikinis and angel wings, something which is also a “perversion of a religious symbol”, the bishop said.

Ms Fontenay, a national institution whose iron hand has kept the Miss France contest going strong, usually gets her way. Ms Bègue is likely to be replaced after Christmas by the runner-up, Miss New Caledonia. Laeticia Bleger, the 2004 Miss France, was suspended on Ms Fontenay’s orders for six months after photos of her surfaced in Playboy.

Joyeux Noël from Charles Bremner’s Paris blog

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