Festival turns up heat on Chirac

France is steeling itself this weekend for a fresh explosion of protest as up to 100,000 angry teachers, students, actors and farmers converge on a tinder-dry plain in the south for the Larzac festival.

A Glastonbury with teeth that, traditionally, is dominated by farming issues, this year's festival will be a forum for discontented sectors striking against the government since the spring. It will plan ways to inflict maximum discomfort on the Chirac government, promising for September a rentrée chaude, a hot return from the summer break. "Larzac will be a fantastic platform on which to organise the rentrée chaude - a great summer school in anti-establishment activity," an editorial in Le Figaro warned drily yesterday.

Ironically, it is one of the few festivals not to have been cancelled by performers and technicians in protest at benefit reforms; Manu Chao and the Asian Dub Foundation are to play this evening.

François Dufour, leader of the Small Farmers' Confederation, said: "We are obliged to lay into the government tooth and nail." Many of France's social problems were caused by globalisation, he added. "All political decisions are being taken with the World Trade Organisation in mind - particularly with anything concerning public services - education and healthcare, water and electricity supplies."

Despite this wider appeal, the gathering's hero will remain José Bové, the sheep-farming anti-globalisation campaigner (known as Asterix of Larzac because of his drooping moustache), who was released last Saturday after serving only a few weeks of a 10-month sentence for destroying GM crops. The champion of the fight against malbouffe, or junk food, will have to fit protesting around his community service obligations.

While the government is nervous about the inflammatory nature of the proceedings, the organisers are concerned about the inflammable nature of the site, where thousands will camp for the weekend; cigarettes have been banned from sale for fear of fire.