Super Fries Saboteur

By THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS

When Jose Bove was growing up in Berkeley, Calif., he was particularly fond of American birthday cakes. "I thought they were fantastic," he says, "with all the icing and decorations and candles. What kid could resist that?" He was apparently less taken with hamburgers. Last August the radical French farm leader led a commando attack on a McDonald's outlet under construction in the southern town of Millau. Armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, wrenches and screwdrivers, these crusaders for the French way of life dismantled the fast-food franchise.

This week Bove is back in America, in Seattle for the opening of the World Trade Organization's new "Millennium Round" of trade-liberalization talks. The symbolism of the trashed McDonald's looms large over the proceeding. As Bove stands at the barricades with thousands of demonstrators, most of them protesting against the WTO and everything it stands for, food is again on his mind.

Behind the August incident in Millau was a deep French anger at the U.S. decision to clamp 100% tariffs on Roquefort cheese and other luxury French-food imports--Washington's WTO-approved response to a European ban on its hormone-treated beef. The broader battle cry of these rural Robin Hoods is their rejection of "la mal-bouffe"--lousy food, as symbolized by the famous American burger chain. Carted off in handcuffs, Bove spent 20 days in prison and emerged as one of France's most popular heroes. Soon he was giving countless TV and newspaper interviews and crisscrossing the country to address admiring groups of farmers, consumers and ecologists. "The judge did us a great service by throwing me in jail," Bove says. "We couldn't have asked for better publicity."

With his walrus mustache, twinkling eyes and charismatic way with words, Bove, 46, seems like a French reincarnation of Poland's Lech Walesa, the plucky union leader who helped topple communism. Bove has become a popular symbol of the fear and loathing many Europeans feel in the face of American-dominated globalization that threatens their culture and national identity.

Bove has a long and colorful history as a rabble rouser. Born in Bordeaux in 1953, he spent most of his first seven years in Berkeley, where his parents studied biochemistry at the University of California. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement against the planned extension of an army base in southern France. Arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, Bove spent three weeks in prison but had the satisfaction of seeing the military project canceled five years later.

In 1987, Bove founded the radical Confederation Paysanne and began launching targeted commando actions in support of traditional French agriculture. Bove denies that his movement is specifically anti-American. "Our struggle is not against America but against uncontrolled globalization," he told TIME. "McDonald's is a symbol of industrial food production. Whether such products are American or French, the effect is the same: the destruction of traditional farming, different cultures and ways of life." He blames the European Union as well as the U.S. for "the imperialism with which they aid agricultural exports." Arguing for the right of every country to "choose what it wants to eat," Bove supports tariff barriers to protect national agricultures and calls for the creation of an independent world court to validate its decisions.

Such is the message Bove hopes to spread to America this week. He claims a sense of kinship with his Yankee counterparts, noting that a group of American farmers contributed $5,000 toward paying his bail after the McDonald's incident. "There are more similarities than differences between us," he says. "We are fighting for the same things." Question for Seattle: Is this town big enough for Bill Gates, Boeing--and Jose Bove?