European Idol; Moore reinforces all Europe's stereotypes about Americans: that they're violent, feckless and arrogant. But he also embodies the national bluntness that Europeans have come to admire. Plus, he's fat and wears a baseball cap.(Michael Moore)(Cover Story)

Byline: Christopher Dickey, With Dana Thomas in Cannes, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Ginanne Brownell in London

French author Gilles Delafon was feeling a little jealous, perhaps, as he sipped his coffee and ate his croissant in a civilized Paris cafe, mulling over the success of Michael Moore. Delafon himself has written several books about the United States, including one called "Violent America," about the craziness of the gun culture. He's a persistent and well-informed critic of Bush administration policy in the Middle East, including the war in Iraq. He's considered one of France's premier journalists. But it's that sacre American muckraker Moore--saying pretty much the same things that Delafon does--who dominates the French best-seller lists and walks off with the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

What is it about this guy? It's not just that Moore has a talent for being hard on his homeland at a time when hard feelings against the United States are running high. And it's not just the way Moore bashes President George W. Bush in "Fahrenheit 9/11." The appeal is more subtle than that, says Delafon, and more conflicted. "The problem for the French is that they don't want to appear anti-American, even if they are. So they like Michael Moore because they can say, 'Look, he's an American who's anti-Bush !' " Delafon sips his espresso and smiles. "And because Moore is fat and ugly, he also fits their stereotype of Americans."

Prejudices are always reassuring to those who hold them. (Just look at the way Americans embrace, as solemn truth, the most appalling cliches about the French as unwashed snobs.) Moore offers Europeans an all-you-can-eat stereotype buffet. His America has the violence and cupidity, the social injustice and simple-minded religiosity, the fearmongering and the feckless foreign policy that Europeans have come to expect from a nation of gun-slinging cowboys and money-grubbing capitalists. But Moore, ever the hero of his own films, also has the energy and irreverence and directness that many Europeans find so inspiring and so appealing about Americans. In the Danish tale of the emperor who had no clothes, which is a very Old World story, only a child dared speak the truth. Europeans like to think that in the United States, people are blunt all the time (however childishly), and have decided Moore is their perfect American enfant terrible . "Moore represents an honest--or at least demagogical--voice which perhaps we [British] lack," says Rob Blackhurst of London's Foreign Policy Centre.

As Nicolas Bourcier wrote recently in Le Monde, "Europe venerates him." And Moore returns the favor: France and Germany are America's great friends, he says, because they worked to keep the United States out of Iraq. "They were trying to say the truth about the folly of this war," Moore told a press conference at Cannes. In the preface to the German edition of "Dude, Where's My Country?" Moore writes that it's time for his German readers to respect themselves again. They are, after all, "leaders of the coalition of the unwilling." As Wieland Freund wrote in the Berlin daily ...