Said to smell like God's feet, France's favourite soft cheese is at the heart of a battle pitting small farmers against the corporations

In his tiny workshop with a view of his cows, Francois Durand stood lovingly ladling raw milk curd into cheese moulds. After several weeks of salting, ripening and maturing, these would turn into the pungent, oozing Camembert that is France's favourite soft cheese - as much part of the national stereotype as the Basque beret, the baguette and a glass of red wine.

"When you use raw, unpasteurised milk, the taste is nice and fruity," Durand mused as he inspected the smelly contents of his ripening rooms. "You can taste what the cows have been eating at different times of year."

Durand is the last dairy farmer in the tiny Normandy village of Camembert still making traditional, raw milk Camembert cheese. But the farm's visitor book hints at the bitter cheese wars that have poisoned the air of the surrounding hills and dales. "Be brave!" urges one scribbled French entry. "Keep up the fight! Thanks for defending real cheese."

For months, small cheese producers and Camembert connoisseurs have been engaged in a battle of David and Goliath, dubbed the "camembert wars", which have captured the French imagination and seen Normans take to the streets to defend their cheese's pungent tang.

"Camembert is a subject that unites all the French," the former president Francois Mitterrand once said. But when small, traditional producers are pitted against France's industrial dairy giants the divide seems vast.

Camembert, whose sharp aroma was once likened to "God's feet", was made fashionable by Napoleon III and popularised as part of rations to soldiers in the first world war. It is France's best-selling cheese after Emmental, so it is not surprising that French industrial diary giants moved in to mass-produce it, buying up small producers and delivering vast amounts of cheaper, machine-produced camembert to supermarket shelves. There are only five remaining small, traditional producers of the prized "Camembert de Normandie".

Last year, the two industrial giants that produced 80% of the exclusive Normandy Camembert that carries France's famous Apellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) stamp of approval, tried to change the rules. Until then, all prized AOC-approved Normandy camembert had been made with raw milk.

The big groups decided instead to make most of their Camembert with pasteurised milk, saying they wanted to protect consumers' health because, when manufacturing large volumes, they could not ensure raw milk was free of dangerous bacteria.

Pasteurising their milk - a process which was cheaper and better suited to mass-production - meant the dairy giants could no longer carry the prized AOC label. But they began a fight to win back the precious AOC stamp, arguing that pasteurised cheese should be included in it.

Last month, Camembert aficionados breathed a sigh of relief when, after a long public battle, cheese authorities said they would protect small producers by reserving the AOC only for Normandy Camembert made in the traditional way with raw milk.

But small cheese-makers say the war is not over and the fight could be turning dirty. In recent weeks, the biggest industrial producer, Lactalis, snitched on a smaller, traditional competitor, telling authorities that dangerous bacteria was found in a batch of AOC raw milk Camembert produced by Reaux. Coincidentally, Reaux happened to be one of Lactalis's biggest critics. The smaller company said there was no evidence of contamination. "This was an operation to destabilise us, it's a new episode in the camembert war, that's for sure," said Reaux's director Bertrand Gillot.

"The camembert war is a symbol of the wider cheese crisis in France," warned Véronique Richez-Lerouge, founder of France's Regional Cheese Association, which lobbies to protect traditional raw-milk varieties.

Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to apply for Unesco world heritage status for French cuisine. Yet, while French leaders have long promoted the ideal of French countryside produce, small, regional cheeses are under threat from intense-production and its food industry giants.

France produces 1,000 cheese varieties, and its huge consumption is second only to the champion cheese-eaters of Europe, the Greeks. But the problem for French purists is the type of cheese that the French are wolfing down. Raw milk cheese makes up only 15% of the market. Dozens of traditional cheese varieties have disappeared over the past 30 years as small producers die out or are bought up by industrial giants.

The new types of cheese created in France now include squeezable, spreadable, and artificially flavoured varieties which strike horror into experts who worry that French teenagers can no longer recognise a proper goat's cheese as their palettes have been numbed. Around 95% of French cheese is now bought in supermarkets, where even cheesemonger counters are disappearing as people prefer their fromage packaged and ready sliced from a fridge unit.

"If it continues like this, in 10 years' time traditional raw milk cheese will be over," Richez-Lerouge said. "France defends its terroir, its great chefs, but that's just window-dressing, in fact France is the nation of Carrefour [the world's second-biggest supermarket giant] and a vast density of McDonalds. Consumers in France aren't aware of the disaster that's happening."

She said even Britain where, like the US and Spain, raw milk cheese is currently in fashion, traditional makers were held in more esteem.

At a table on Durand's Normandy farm, Gérard Roger, a camembert historian and president of the newly-created Defence Committee for Authentic Camembert, reluctantly agreed to taste-test a mass-produced, big-selling supermarket camembert.

"Wow, it stinks," he says sniffing the pale, uniform cheese. "It's dull, it tastes of nothing." Roger's group, which has organised street demonstrations, see themselves as "guardians of the temple". Now they have won a victory in the AOC battle for raw milk camembert, they are lobbying to protect authentic production methods, encouraging more small farmers to make cheese using milk from local Normandy cows.

Francis Rouchaud the group's secretary and a former marketing expert, said the big industrial producers wanted to put out a maximum number of Camembert products: "It's Coca-Cola thinking".

Lactalis, the world's second largest dairy processor, countered: "We are not trying to kill off the small people, that doesn't interest us at all. We're a global dairy company in 20 countries. We've got better things to do." A spokesman said that although the risk from raw milk was very small, for the company's big brands it preferred not to take it. He said there was nothing malicious in alerting the authorities to a bacteria-risk in competitor's cheese.

Charlie Turnbull, an exclusive cheesemonger from Dorset and judge at the world cheese awards, was visiting Durand's farm to pay homage to the "cathedral" of camembert. "The French put art before enterprise," he said. "Whereas the British put enterprise before art."

But small French producers are still on guard against mass-produced cheese. Inspecting his matured Camemberts, Durand said: "We must keep fighting to defend raw milk cheese, but we can't do it alone, French consumers must help us."