In many ways she was the ideal Body Shop recruit. Young, intelligent, energetic and idealistic, Anya Robson endorsed the Body Shop Charter so wholeheartedly that its gushing working could just have easily flowed from her own pen. 'Honesty, integrity and caring form the foundations of the Company, and should flow through everything we do'. Humanity, creativity, ecology, care, respect, family, the environment - it all sounded too good to be true. A graduate in anthropology from Edinburgh University and anxious to find something interesting and worthwhile to do now that she had settled with her businessman husband Rory in the south of France, Anya picked up a Body Shop leaflet and did as many others have done before her - applied for a franchise in the country she had adopted as her home.

"It seemed to me all too clear that there was nothing in France in between the expensive and snooty parfumeries on the one hand and the supermarkets, where you get no advice and can't test the products, on the other. As an anthropologist I was attracted to the trade-not-aid concept as articulated by Anita Roddick. We went off to see Wilf Gillender, who owned the French rights through his company GW Management. He had been very successful with Body Shop in Newcastle, where had flash offices. We could hardly sign on the dotted line quickly enough. We felt very much that we wanted to be pioneers - even though we had no figures to base our decisions on. We put in over 100,000 pounds of our own money - funds generated almost entirely from my husband's Ducati motorbike business. The remaining 170,000 was loaned to us by a bank. We entered into these commitments willingly, aware that the 'green' market was underdeveloped in France. Besides, I knew for myself that Body Shop products were good. There was not the slightest doubt in our minds that the French were going to lap it up."

Based in smart premises in the Polygone, the leading shopping centre of the handsome city of Montpellier, the capital both of the Herault department and the Languedoc region, the Robsons opened their doors for business in the August of 1991. The first year's trading was sound enough, although there were no signs of the Body Shop's environmentally friendly soaps and shampoos being snapped up like petit pains, the French equivalent of hot cakes. Anya's campaigning against animal testing was greeted by disbelief - it was not that the French did not care - rather that they were entirely uninformed about the issue of animal rights. Plus, it has to be said, in the country of Chanel and Yves St. Laurent, the Body Shop's distinctly unchic formula of plastic bottles and bright, cheap and cheerful packaging was not particularly well-received. And as for their policy of refusing to sell or use products which consume a disproportionate amount of energy during manufacture or disposal, or cause unnecessary waste, well, the Gallic reaction on the whole one large and unanimous shoulder-shrugging bof.

"I was packing in the hours", Anya relates, "but my attitude began to change quite early on when I realized that a number of financial promises that had been made to us, for example about margins, had not been kept. We complained that we were having to pay for things like posters and window displays - costs which had never been presented to us. To which they would reply: 'well, we didn't tell you that you would have to sweep the floor every morning either.'"

In fact France had been the weak link in the Body Shop chain being forged across Europe from the very outset of Anita Roddick's international campaign. Whereas in 1990 Sweden could point to no less than 30 boutiques, the first having opened back in 1979, the very first French shop only opened in Paris eight years on. A number of the French franchisees, the Robsons included, are now looking to Body Shop International to remedy the situation and law suits, writs and counter-claims are now flying around France's main cities thick and fast. Meanwhile a number of Body Shops have closed - in Grenoble, Pau, Perpignan and Nantes to name but a few - the shops in prime trading centres such as Bordeaux and Toulouse actually filing for bankruptcy. It all seemed a far cry from Anita's early, heady Brighton days and the booming eighties.

"I put it down to colonial arrogance", Rory Robson adds, fed up with watching his hard-earned funds subsiding the Body Shop in France. "Its the sort of attitude that you can walk into a country where you don't speak the language, don't know the culture and customs, apply what you have done in the Newcastle, and think that it will work. GW Management still has no French directors to this day. The whole story is a catastrophe from start to finish and one for which I hold GW Management totally responsible. And as for Body Shop International - they simply don't want to know either."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the stress and strain of daily battle has exacted its toll on Anya. Not only has the greater part of her idealism been knocked for a six by the harsh realities of life within Body Shop a la francaise - she has now reached the point where it is difficult to even contemplate the notion of setting foot in her shop at the Polygone at all, preferring to stay at home with her three small children and leaving the running of the business to a small team of trusted employees.

"We just want to get out", she confirms. "We can't afford to walk away, much as we would like to, for we have too many debts. And don't laugh - for years the Montpellier shop was held up as the very model of how a Body Shop in France should be run, prospective franchisees often being referred on to us. Despite all of our problems my shop remains the top performing shop in France outside of Paris - and it still isn't making any money. BSI have squandered a five year flying start in France - now Yves Rocher has done it for himself and jumped onto the green bandwagon, so my view is that the Body shop has missed the French boat altogether."

"I really wanted to believe in the Body Shop philosophy" Anya relates rather sorrowfully, "that it is possible to demonstrate that success and profits can go hand in hand with decent values and ideals. For us though the dream has turned into a nightmare. As for anyone toying with the idea of applying for a Body Shop franchise in France - I have just one thing to say - don't touch it with a barge-pole."

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