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Outside Magazine June 2001

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The Roquefort Files
He's the savior of fromage, the scourge of McDonald's, the protector of organic goodness against the specter of mad cows and bioengineered crops. Busted in France, evicted from Brazil, this pipe-smoking, draft-dodging, ewe-raising farmer is a bona fide environmental star. And now he's going to jail for it. Florence Williams on the trials of José Bové.
By Florence Williams


	"Je suis un paysan": Peasant manqué José Bové photographed at a farm on France's Larzac plateau.

The accused threads his way up the steps of the stone Palais de Justice in the ancient Mediterranean city of Montpellier. He has receding sandy hair and a comically long walrus mustache, wears a fey little yellow neck scarf, and clutches a pipe. Muscular young activists in yellow T-shirts escort him past dozens of aggressive TV cameramen, all cursing through their cigarettes and jockeying for a better angle. One trips and is trampled by the others. Halfway up the stairs, the defendant turns, smiles into the cameras, and gazes over the several hundred protesters gathered on the street below."Tous ensemble! Tous ensemble!" they are shouting. They, too, are wearing fey little yellow neck scarves.

The defendant grins, gives a thumbs-up, and pumps his fist. The crowd goes wild. Their hero is, with the possible exception of President Jacques Chirac, France's most famous political personality. He has been compared to Voltaire and to Robin Hood; the Socialist Party has urged him to run for President. His name is José Bové. He makes cheese.

It is the morning of February 15, 2001, and Bové, 47, and his nine (virtually unnoticed) codefendants are appealing their sentences for criminal vandalism convictions, charges resulting from an August 1999 protest in which a McDonald's under construction just outside the farming village of Millau was disassembled, bolt by bolt, and carted away. The McDonald's Ten are all members of France's national Confédération Paysanne, the militant small-farmers' union Bové cofounded in 1987. Bové, who was sentenced to three months in prison, is unapologetic. He took apart the McDonald's to protest American imperialism, its trade policies, and the general, noxious spread of malbouffe. Malbouffe, Bové has said, "implies eating any old thing, prepared in any old way. ... Both the standardization of food like McDonald's—the same taste from one end of the world to the other—and the choice of food associated with the use of hormones and GMOs [genetically modified organisms], as well as the residues of pesticides and other things that can endanger health."

This week, in addition to hearing Bové's McDonald's appeal, the French justice system will consider a prosecutor's appeal of Bové's suspended sentence in his conviction of holding hostage three agriculture officials whose policy decisions he disliked. (Their imprisonment in an office in the Aveyron regional department of agriculture lasted ten minutes.) A week ago, a judge gave him a ten-month suspended sentence for leading a protest that involved breaking into a research laboratory, spray-painting computers, and uprooting trays of transgenic rice. Bové already spent nearly three weeks behind bars after his arrest for the McDonald's insurrection. Unlike the rest of the McDonald's Ten, he strategically refused bail, milking the public sympathy and media attention that followed.

Since the storming of the McDonald's, "Bovémania" has spread as quickly as foot-and-mouth disease. Bové has been interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered and assessed by policy experts on Nightline with Ted Koppel. Strangers shout his name. During the November 1999 antiWorld Trade Organization protests in Seattle, he delivered fiery speeches, linked arms in human chains, and gave away 500 kilos of Roquefort smuggled in from France. Last year, he traveled to India, Turkey, and Madison, Wisconsin (cheese capital of the U.S.A.!), to rouse farmers against globalization. In January 2001, he speechified at the World Social Forum held in Brazil in opposition to the CEO-heavy World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. For good measure, he led hundreds of campesinos on a midnight raid to uproot genetically engineered soybean plants on farmland owned by the Monsanto Corporation.

Bové's free-market enemies have dismissed him as a mercenary, a poseur, and a nationalistic xenophobe. But as Europe convulses in a deepening agricultural crisis, as Britain torches and buries more than a million farm animals this year alone, Bové's star only ascends higher. Wielding his campy blend of folksiness and intellectualism, along with an unerring instinct for political theater, he has elevated France's debate over food purity and traditional agriculture to the highest levels of the national agenda. France, partly in response to Bové's charming commando campaign, has conducted a more focused, urgent debate over agricultural globalism, bioengineered crops, tainted beef, and farming contagions than any country in the world. Even the staid Parisian newspaper Le Monde was moved to proclaim, "It is a cultural imperative to resist the hegemonic pretenses of the hamburger."

And so, on this late-winter morning, Bové, a veteran of four decades of left-wing mischief making, turns away with one last wave and enters the Palais de Justice knowing that, at least for the moment, history is on his side. He is the spirit of the Revolution and of badass environmentalism—a cell-phone wielding, worldwide rabble-rousing, draft-dodging former hippie. He has a wife, a girlfriend, a small army of attorneys, and the ear of the prime minister. He is very French.

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