In the torment of "Monicagate" President Clinton may wish he were President of France. Such a scandal is inconceivable here, according to the sociologist Gerard Mermet.
"During the Mitterrand era, the media knew about his mistress and [illegitimate] daughter, but they didn't talk about it. There is an understanding between journalists and politicians; a politician's sex life is not considered news here," Mr Mermet said.
As part of this tacit agreement, French leaders do not exploit their family life to shore up their image. "Our elected officials have never claimed to be professors of morality," writes Pierre Georges in Le Monde. "If they were drumming lessons of virtue into us while living it up on the side, the famous reserve of our media would fall very quickly!"
Perhaps the French media merely want to keep the gossip for themselves. One former French president drove into the back of a milk-truck while he fondled a female television presenter. The accident was the talk of Paris for months, but not a line appeared in the newspapers. While his wife pursued worthy Third World causes, the late President Francois Mitterrand installed his museum-curator mistress and their daughter in an Elysee annex. Meanwhile, a younger female Swedish journalist made frequent visits to his Elysee bedroom - and tagged along on state visits.
When these secrets seeped out after Mitterrand's death, France emitted a collective twitter of titillation, as if to say "Well, what do you expect?"
The indulgence extends to wiretapping: like Richard Nixon, Mitterrand had his enemies' telephones tapped. The French president also listened in to the conversations of the Chanel model turned actress, Carole Bouquet, whom he fancied. Yet, while Nixon was disgraced, France's national library is named after Mitterrand, and he appears on postage stamps. French conventional wisdom says that Nixon was "the best president America ever had", and that those naive, puritanical Americans were fools to hound him out of office.
The French take it for granted that powerful men have powerful sex drives. "Can't you imagine the extraodinary sexual appetite that comes with the conquest of the White House?" the columnist Bernard Pivot writes sarcastically. "The incredible hormonal imbalance provoked by running the most powerful state in the world, the terrifying production of testosterone that results from it?"
The most mystifying thing to the average Frenchmen is that Mr Clinton's alleged paramours - slightly plump and heavily madeup - don't correspond to the French idea of beauty.
"Fornigate", as French newspapers call it, inspires a mixture of scorn and disquiet here; scorn for the Americans' inability to distinguish between the public and private lives of their leaders - "poor husbands don't necessarily make poor presidents," Gerard Mermet explains - and disquiet that, in the words of a television commentator, "President Clinton's sexual accident is a global accident".
The scandal transformed world politics and economics in just 48 hours and "the Europeans have no means of affecting this affair. . . The planet suffers when the US is sure of itself and dominating, and it suffers even more when America is weakened and uncertain."
The late President Francois Mitterrand, still revered in France despite his well-known extra-marital relationships.