According to a report from Business Insider, the ballyhooed acquisition of chipmaker Altera by bigger chipmaker Intel is being held up by an age-old problem; the historically aggressive, tenaciously mean, scary-ass French.

One banker, who is not working on the deal, told Business Insider a potential sticking point in the deal are French regulators. He said they would prefer a strategic investor buy Altera, instead of a private equity firm.

Yeah, we know. Chilling.

It's easy to see how Intel, with it's $155 billion market cap could be running in terror from what we assume are a gaggle of Gerard Depardieu clones in a government office pouting their lower lips and ashing their cigarillos all over compliance documents.

But hey $15 billion - the widely-rumored price tag for Altera - is a lot of coin, and it might be enough to scare off Andy Grove's descendants from acquiring a growing rival.

That said, we feel confident that if Intel reallty wanted this to happen, they could find a way to make the rough and tumble French government say "Allors! Just take the company for billions of your dollars, you bourgeois cows."

Here's what could be holding up one of the biggest tech M&A deals of 2015 [BI]