Emerging from a cloud of carefully-targeted baking flour at a campaign meeting on Wednesday, presidential frontrunner François Hollande shouldn’t have been all too surprised. He's not the first French politician to fall victim to a one-sided food fight. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and ex-socialist candidate Ségolène Royal have had cream pies thrown in their faces, and former PM Lionel Jospin once came under attack from a tube of Ketchup.

In fact, the practice is so common here that actual verbs exist to tell the tale, depending on the “weapon” in question. Quite impressive for a language that actively fights the English practice of turning nouns into verbs...

Entartrer: “Cream-pied”

In 2002, Socialist politician Ségolène Royal (then partner of François Hollande), was attacked in broad daylight with the most popular of projectable foodstuffs: a cream pie.

In 2007, just before he was elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy also fell victim to a flying cream pie. But unlike Royal, the then presidential candidate was unable to keep his cool after his own “entartrage”.

En-ketchup-er…? "Ketchuped"

Perhaps the cruellest of foodstuffs, tomato sauce, was employed to target then prime minister, Lionel Jospin, at a conference in Rennes in April 2002. You can catch the moment in the video at the bottom.

Enfariner: “Flour-bombed”

Perhaps not as common (or tasty) as a cream pie, a bag of flour is certainly an efficient tool in humiliating a politician head-to-toe, as François Hollande learnt yesterday. The presidential frontrunner emerged from his “enfarinage” in record time however, making it one of the least messy incidents in the short history of food-related attacks on French politicians.

If you want to relive the moment, you can visit the “enfarinage” online training platform. But be warned - you need to really hate François Hollande if you expect to spend more than one bag of flour there...