No one running for president of France has much good to say about George W. Bush, but the Gallic love affair with the romantic America of yore is on all the candidates' lips, even those of anti-globalization activist and McDonald's trasher José Bové.

The mustachioed sheep-farmer-turned-global-icon of the no-global movement could pass for Astérix, the little comic book hero from Gaul. He proudly self-identifies as a "peasant." He gestures with a pipe when he speaks and he's prone to belly laughs. Bové, gruff-voiced and jovial, is making his second run for the French presidency this spring, but he hasn't lost his renegade Robin Hood edge. Bové was sentenced in February to four months in prison for tearing up a field of genetically modified crops - and some latter-day Sheriff of Nottingham could put him behind bars at any time, even mid-campaign.

But this week in Murphy's Café, a bistro and smoke shop across from the train station in Poitiers in western France, Bové cautioned against too much of a broad-brush approach to French relations with America.

Waiting for an order of tenderloin before a campaign rally, Bové had put away his pipe and was gesturing with his steak knife. "The French people are not hostile to the American people - that's a fantasy of the Bush administration," said Bové with a flourish of the makeshift rapier. He credited Americans with playing a seminal role in the movement he supports, launching as they did the first gathering against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.

"Very often in history, mobilization starts in the United States . We saw it during the Vietnam War, in the sixties: the United States was very much at the forefront in questioning the war." Maybe even more important in Bové' s anti-mercantile view, they were out there "questioning the commoditization of the world."

"So there are two Americas ," said Bové . "There is this America that, for 200 years, has always shown strong directions for new cultures, or cultural and social advances. And there is another that is represented by Bush: this America that is completely closed, self-assured, warlike."

"For me, if I'm looking for role models in the United States, my role models are Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, folks like that. They're who represent the United States ," said the sheep-farming candidate.

In fact, if contemporary America is strangely absent from candidates' discourse, '60s America is alive and well. Bové looks proud when he tells friends across the table of the support thrown his way last summer by an American folk singer. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame dropped by the peasant market in Bové's village to sing for a crowd of 500. "I mean, Peter, Paul, and Mary - they're the ones who sang at the March on Washington for civil rights."

Bové 's dinner at Murphy's is a short one. He has a crowd 800-strong waiting for him in a concert hall in uptown Poitiers . The evening's "festive debate" has organic wine on tap and a tuba player as part of the entertainment. Bové is polling under 2 percent nationwide, but here in the region of which Ségolène Royal is president, the hall is full.

On the front steps, the television cameramen flick on their lights as Bové approaches. A clutch of supporters on the sidewalk begins to clap, when out of the shadows a kid with a faux-hawk runs at Bové -- and plants an improvised cream-pie on the side of his head. Dripping sticky goo, the candidate turns, annoyed but calm, to his assailant. "Bravo," says Bové . The crowd is laughing. Bové walks over to the guy and gives him a bear hug.

You could call it the Poitiers Pie Party, where defiance and a little adolescence get their just desserts.