France is probably not a country one would associate with a booming trade in Big Macs. After all, this is a nation known for its love of good food and wine. It is also here that a group of sheep farmers led by José Bové became overnight folk heroes after dismantling a McDonald’s in the south of France eight years ago.

Such is the Gallic resentment of the US fast food chain that the country’s influential daily Le Monde once warned that McDonald’s “commercial hegemony threatens agriculture and [its] cultural hegemony insidiously ruins alimentary behaviour – sacred reflections of French identity”. Yet nationalist rhetoric has done little to stem the growth of McDo, as the Golden Arches are referred to in France.