Noël Godin, a Belgian entertainer and anarchist who demonstrated his distaste for pomposity by hurling cream pies at executives, politicians and celebrities, a dessert-based form of protest that splattered Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard, among many others, died on Aug. 23. He was 80.

His partner, the actress Sylvie Broodthaers, confirmed the death in a statement to Agence France-Presse. No other details were provided.

A self-described “anarcho-confectioner,” Mr. Godin led the International Patisserie Brigade, a gang of custard commandos who referred to their assaults as entartements. They deployed pies with soft crusts to ensure that their caloric projectiles would only injure pride.

“We use only the finest patisserie, ordered at the last minute from small local bakers,” Mr. Godin told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 1995. “Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”

Mr. Godin — “pie-eyed, pudding-faced and potbellied,” in one writer’s description — was a pain in the derrière most of his life, beginning in Catholic school when he complained to the priests about his lackluster sex life.

In 1968, after participating in the student uprisings in Paris, he was expelled from the University of Liège in Belgium for dousing a right-wing law professor with a pot of glue.

Unsuited for regular employment, Mr. Godin found work writing for Friends of Film, an obscure entertainment magazine for which he fabricated articles, including one about the jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s investment in a movie titled “The Vegetables of Good Will,” staring Claudia Cardinale as a giant endive.

He also concocted filmmakers. One was Georges Le Gloupier. In 1969, Mr. Godin reported that Mr. Le Gloupier had attacked the (real) director Robert Bresson with a cream pie. In the next issue, Mr. Godin reported that the (real) writer Marguerite Duras, a friend of Mr. Bresson’s, tossed a pie at Mr. Le Gloupier in retaliation.

“Madame,” Mr. Le Gloupier supposedly shot back, “I prefer your pastry to your literature.”

A few days after making up the reprisal to the made-up attack, Mr. Godin heard that Ms. Duras was (really) set to appear at a cinema in Belgium. He hatched a plan to (really) pie her in the face; succeeded; and then reported that Mr. Le Gloupier had been the launcher.

A nemesis was born.

Taking on the persona of Mr. Le Gloupier, Mr. Godin formed his brigade, a ragtag group of filmmakers, writers and anarchist gadflies who shouted “Gloup, Gloup, Gloup!” as they flung their pastries.

While Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges were among the first to demonstrate the hilarity of pie throwing, Mr. Godin refined the art of using whipped cream as a kind of protest.

“There are a thousand forms of subversion, all of them interesting,” he told The Observer. “But few, in my opinion, can equal the convenience and immediacy of the cream pie.”

He followed a self-imposed code of ethics when choosing targets. “They’re always very rich,” Mr. Godin told The New York Times in 1998. “We never attack inoffensive, harmless celebrities or people who are now in a weak position.”

He and his co-conspirators had a particular revulsion to the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, who once called himself “the most gifted writer of my generation,” a statement of such pomposity that the brigade was moved to pie him eight times.

While most pie victims took their lickings by licking the payload — Mr. Godard, the filmmaker, earned kudos from the brigade for slurping whipped cream off his fingers — Mr. Lévy knocked Mr. Godin down and yelled, “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”

“When I was a child and adolescent, I used to fight antisemites,” Mr. Lévy, who is Jewish, said during an interview on France 3, a public television network. “And that’s what I was taught: that there’s no point arguing, that you needed to hit. So I hit.”

Mr. Godin’s signature operation was pieing Mr. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, during a visit to Brussels in 1998. More than 30 people, carrying two dozen pies, were involved in the stunt.

“On the actual day of the hit, we had to wait all afternoon,” Mr. Godin told Dazed magazine. “We congregated at the pub and drank monks’ beer to give us all courage.”

Sufficiently tipsy, they fanned out to a hotel where Mr. Gates was arriving to give a speech.

“We shouted the war cry — ‘Let us flan, let us flan the tainted money!’ — and then went into action,” Mr. Godin said. “In total, he received three pies outside and a further one straight in the face when he entered the hotel lobby.”

Mr. Gates declined to press charges. His only complaint, The Seattle Times noted, was that the pie wasn’t tasty.

Mr. Godin was born in Liège, Belgium, on Sept. 13, 1945. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was active in the Catholic church.

He did not yield to authority, especially in school. “Young Godin’s spirited anticlerical capers would stop at nothing,” Andrew Gallix wrote in the online cultural journal 3:AM Magazine, including “hitching up the nuns’ skirts” and “playing a recorded concert of farts during Mass.”

Like other anarchists, he was shaped by the tumultuous 1960s, especially his experiences in the Paris student uprisings.

“I have always remained true to the spirit of May ’68,” he told Dazed. “I still live for that time and have always advocated direct sabotage, the sabotage of the professions, the sabotage of the roles into which we are trapped by our day-to-day boredom.”

Mr. Godin had a hodgepodge of professions. As a writer, he published books on film theory and the history of radicalism, as well as a memoir, “Cream and Punishment.” He directed several short Dada-punk films and had cameos in films made by his friends, including Jan Bucquoy.

Visiting Mr. Godin’s home in Brussels in 1998, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal found the floors “strewn with cat litter and cigarette butts. Half-empty wine glasses and dirty plates jockey for space with piles of books and papers.”

Mr. Godin had a collection of more than 10,000 videos, most of which were slapstick movies. He viewed his life’s work as a series of miniature blockbusters. “Pastry attacks are made like films,” he said in 2022. “Except that their main protagonists don’t know that they are playing in it.”

Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Godin told The Observer that he did not have children “because it would be irresponsible to bring them into this bleak and tragic world.”

Over the years, Mr. Godin was offered large sums of money to attack certain celebrities.

“For instance, I had an offer to pie Catherine Deneuve in Cannes and also Sharon Stone,” he told The Netly News, a web zine. “I refused. I love Catherine Deneuve and the movies of Jacques Demy. And that year Sharon Stone was in a Western I really liked. So I had nothing against her.”

Also, it would have been unseemly to accept cash.

“We want to be freebooters, pirates with pies,” Mr. Godin told The Los Angeles Times in 1997. “We will never be mercenaries, because then we’d be a pathetic bunch, indeed.”