Maybe it was lost in translation.

A longtime French teacher claims the Upper East Side’s elite, all-girls Spence School fired her for giving a straightforward answer about France’s controversial hijab law — which triggered the principal’s daughter so much she cried in class.

Her comments were accused of being sympathetic to the ban and Islamophobic by the school, which allegedly denied her any due process, despite years of praise for her advanced language classes, a new lawsuit claims.

“It’s Orwellian,” Anne Protopappas, a celebrated educator who had taught at the prestigious $65,000 a year school since 1999, told The Post.

Now, at 62, she’s been unable to find a new job after being sacked by the storied 132-year-old school, which boasts prestigious alumni such as Madeleine Astor, Gwyneth Paltrow, along with the children of figures such as Henry Clay Frick, Mick Jagger and Michael Bloomberg.

“So you teach the daughter of the head of the school, and then you can’t teach anymore?” Protopappas said. “You don’t just destroy people — like now, I have nothing. No livelihood, nothing.”

Protopappas says that she was viewed by students and parents — many of whom attended her special “Salon” classes open to the public — as a “quintessential Spence teacher” who valued “truth” and students, believing the school’s motto of “not for school but for life we learn.”