In the past year, French sheep farmer and cheesemaker Jose Bove has become one of the most popular figures in France -- a Robin Hood with a radical message of opposition to the corporate globalization that seeks to impose a new world economic order on every corner of the planet.

And this week, Bove will make his way to Madison.

Jose Bove drew international headlines a little more than a year ago, when he led the symbolic dismantling of a McDonald's restaurant that was being constructed near the tiny village where he tends the sheep and produces his feisty cheeses.

The fast food company survived the assault -- although the new French outlet did suffer $100,000 in damage at the hands of Bove and his diligent dismantlers. French authorities did arrest Bove and his followers for vandalism, but their attempts to prosecute proved fruitless -- tens of thousands of anti-corporate activists protested outside the courthouse where he was being tried, and the authorities eventually reduced the charges.

On Sept. 13, Bove will be sentenced and it is expected that he will get, at most, a firm slap on the wrist.

Why will Bove beat the rap? Because his arrest made him an iconic figure in the struggle to create a more humane and sustainable global economy. His challenge to a prominent symbol of international corporate globalization -- and the crushing sameness in food products, clothing and media culture that it imposes -- struck a nerve in France. Within months of his arrest for the McDonald's attack, France's conservative president and socialist prime minister were stumbling over one another to be the loudest in their praise of Bove.

And when the radical sheep farmer showed up last fall in Seattle to protest against the World Trade Organization, he was accorded hero status in the streets. His attempt to give away French cheese outside a McDonald's just blocks from where the ministers of global finance and trade were meeting drew thousands of trade unionists, environmentalists and farmers like Wisconsin's John Kinsman -- Bove's friend and comrade in the struggle to defend family farms around the world against the onslaught of corporate agribusiness.

The wildly enthusiastic response he gained in Seattle did not surprise Bove. "McDonald's, really, has become the symbol for the whole world of globalization,'' the farmer says, explaining that the eerie sameness of the fast food giant's menus, color schemes and restaurant designs reminds people all over the world that their local tastes and values are being dismissed in a headlong rush to enhance a corporate bottom line.

"Their only interest is profit,'' Bove says of McDonald's. "What's happening for the people all over the world? They don't care about them.''

This week, Bove and Kinsman will be spreading the word in Wisconsin, at a UW conference on food policy Friday, and across from Saturday's Farmers' Market downtown at the annual Food for Thought Festival. And if he does not get the "rock-star'' response that explodes wherever he shows up in France, Bove has no doubt he will find allies in Madison.

It's not just that Wisconsin is a traditional farm state -- and a cheesemaking state, at that.

Bove thinks Americans are ripe for his message of resistance to overarching economic powers. After all, the French farmer says, this is the country that got started with a Boston Tea Party that involved the destruction of some property.

"This was a response to economic policies that were undemocratic,'' Bove says of that long-ago tea party. "This is how you Americans inspired us, just as, perhaps, now we will inspire you.''

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