Noël Godin, Belgian anarchist known to his fans as L’Entarteur who deflated egos with custard pies
Noël Godin, Belgian anarchist known to his fans as L’Entarteur who deflated egos with custard pies
Telegraph ObituariesSat, August 29, 2026 at 5:22 AM UTC
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Godin is thrown off the red carpet by security at the Cannes festival in 2004 - FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP via Getty
Noël Godin, who has died aged 80, was a Belgian anarchist who took the old English music-hall tradition of custard pie-throwing (entartement in French) and turned it into a political art form.
Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.
This last accusation was one levelled at his most famous victim, the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, who was set upon in February 1998 during a visit to Belgium by a group of followers Godin called his International Patisserie Brigade. Yelling “Gloup! Gloup! Gloup!” they launched a small squadron of cream tarts, four of which reached their target, covering him in whipped cream.
Gates, though “surprised and disappointed” by the attack, managed to retain a modicum of dignity, jokingly complaining that the pie “wasn’t even that tasty”.
Gates joked that the pie ‘wasn’t even that tasty’ - Getty images
The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.
Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”
That was one of seven attacks on the philosopher by Godin and his accomplices: “He takes himself monstrously seriously,” Godin complained. “He is totally in love with himself to the most spectacular degree of imbecility.”
So successful was Godin’s campaign that for many years, whenever Lévy’s puppet on the satirical French television show Les Guignols de l’info began to speak, it was silenced by a cream tart. Godin promised to leave the philosopher alone only if he sang a silly song after the next attack.
“The first five seconds after the delivery of a pie,” Godin remarked, “offer a stark revelation of a victim’s real character.”
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‘BHL’ after being hit by a Godin-thrown pie in 2015 - ANTHONY DEHEZ/BELGA/AFP via Getty Images
Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.
In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.
Godin also did the occasional spot of acting, including an appearance in Sexual Life of the Belgians, a 1994 comedy film directed by the Belgian provocateur Jan Bucquoy.
Godin, left, with a tart - Shutterstock
Godin inspired an unknown number of pie-throwing groups around the world. “By phone call, fax, letter, in the street, people keep offering us their services,” he claimed. In San Francisco they called themselves the Biotic Baking Brigade, and their pies were vegan. Godin, though, preferred the tarte classique, filled with whipped cream, and perhaps a little chocolate, in soft sponge cake.
“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”
In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.
Godin financed his sorties by selling film and photos of the attacks to the media, but claimed to have turned down lucrative offers to target well-known film stars such as Catherine Deneuve. “We have never been pie mercenaries,” he said: “I love Catherine Deneuve.”
Godin lived in a modest house in northern Brussels with five cats and his wife Sylvie Van Hiel, an actress, who survives him.
Noël Godin, born September 13 1945, died August 23 2026
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
