Cheese farmer with beef with McDonald's faces music today

When Jose Bove talks about McDonald's being an "irresistible target" it doesn't mean his mouth is watering for fries and a Big Mac. Last June, the sheep farmer from Larzac, south-central France, stood trial for destroying a McDonald's building. Judges will hand down a verdict today.

Mr Bove and nine co-defendants from the Peasants' Confederation chose the McDonald's for its symbolism, Mr Bove explains, pausing to light his pipe. "It wasn't an anti-McDonald's campaign, but a campaign against a World Trade Organisation (WTO) decision. The WTO authorised the US to put a 100 per cent surcharge on certain European products, because the EU refused to import their hormone beef."

Whoever drew up the list must not have known that Mr Bove was a leader of the regional sheep's milk and rocquefort producers' syndicate, or they would surely have thought twice before involving rocquefort in the trade retaliation. Mr Bove has spent much of his life as a militant - fighting the extension of army bases, nuclear tests, the French presence in the South Pacific.

"We were taken hostage and there was no possible recourse," Mr Bove continues. "We went to see the French and European authorities to see if we could take the WTO or the US to court, and we were told there was nothing we could do.

"At the very moment when all this was going on, the McDonald's chain decided to build a new fast-food outlet in Millau, in the heart of the roquefort cheese region. It was a dream target; there was a powerful contrast between hormone beef, which symbolises the industrial production of food, and rocquefort, which was the first French cheese to win an appellation d'origine controlee back in 1925. And they were building a McDonald's - the most standardised, industrial food of all . . . "

Mr Bove dots his speech with the interjections quoi, hein and ben - perhaps, like the jeans, leather jacket and pipe, an attempt to seem a little less the son of academics and a little more the peasant farmer who never went to university.

Jean Viard, a director of research at the French science foundation CNRS, explains the incredible rise of Jose Bove - known as "Bovemania" - by calling him "a bridge between the rural and urban worlds". "France has been a peasant republic for a long time," Mr Viard says. "Someone who speaks of land is seen to represent the values of the Republic."

Today the Republic sits in judgment on Bove. At the end of his trial - which the Peasants' Confederation turned into a Woodstock-like festival with more than 50,000 people - the prosecutor recommended a 10-month prison sentence, with nine months suspended. This was far more lenient than the five years in prison and 500,000 francs fine that Mr Bove and his comrades risked under French law.

But Mr Bove isn't worried about prison; he wants to be right. "It's possible the magistrates are intelligent, and they'll want to recognise the importance of what we did by making a symbolic gesture," he says. If he receives a suspended sentence he will appeal. "There's no question of accepting a sentence like that. The only solution is acquittal. We didn't destroy the McDonald's; we dismantled it with screw drivers and tools. We didn't sack it."

Being charged with vandalism transformed Mr Bove from a leftover May 1968 hippie, who has squatted on a sheep farm for the past 25 years, into an articulate crusader against globalisation, a leader of the November 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle and the interlocutor of the French President and Prime Minister.

Both men asked to meet him at last winter's Salon de l'Agriculture, and Prime Minister Jospin then invited Mr Bove to dinner. His fame has spread to the US, where he just starred at a University of Wisconsin colloquium about agriculture, technology and trade.

Mr Bove insists he is not against the movement of people and goods around the planet. "What we oppose is the idea that globalisation merely means an extension of markets, and that markets will make everyone happy. The logic they're trying to impose through the WTO is that markets are the great organiser of the world, that the bigger the markets, the more prosperity and development. It's exactly the opposite that happens - especially for agriculture. These ideas are destroying agriculture around the world, for the sole benefit of multinationals from the richest countries."

Not if Jose Bove has anything to say about it. He is encouraged by the suspension of WTO negotiations since Seattle. "International leaders were forced to recognise that the rules of the game and their objectives didn't correspond to what their citizens wanted," he says triumphantly. "They've had to go back to square one and think about it."