Carla Bruni Tell-All: Another Run-of-the-Mill French Sex Scandal?

(SEPT. 2) -- By some accounts, Carla Bruni is having a bad week.

The state-run Iranian paper that called France's first lady a "prostitute" last week clarified on Tuesday that it did in fact mean "prostitute" when it wrote "prostitute." Then on Wednesday, British newspapers reported that French publisher Flammarion was set to release a scandalous tell-all on Bruni's life, from "secret lovers to plastic surgeons."

Bruni's lawyers told The Telegraph of London that they were "bracing themselves" for the book, set to release this month, which apparently includes new details on the already reported juicy tidbit that Bruni, an Italian-born former model and singer, and her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, allegedly kept a senior head of state waiting while they danced the horizontal mambo.

But the French are as inured to scandals are they are to overripe camemberts and transportation strikes. Will this book and the secrets it promises to reveal really cause much of a ripple? Probably not.

To put it in perspective, Flammarion is promising damning stories about a woman who famously said "monogamy bores me" in a 2007 interview -- before marrying the newly-divorced president a few months later.

In American politics, a book of revelations about the first lady would indeed be a nightmare. Imagine the unrepentant glee the Tea Party would express if it learned Michelle Obama's toned arms were actually sculpted by a plastic surgeon. Or the opprobrium in which Democratic leaders could happily bask if they learned that Laura Bush had been carousing with rock stars while her husband was outside clearing brush.

But the French government is infamous for scandal. In March, European media reported that both President Nicolas Sarkozy and Bruni were having affairs. The claim was angrily denied and probably baseless, but it was not incredible on the face of it: Sarkozy and Bruni, after all, were married four months after Sarkozy and his second wife, Cecilia, divorced amid open evidence of both parties' extramarital activity.

Jacques Chirac's extramarital affairs were well known in France, and when they were chronicled in the 2007 book "Stranger in the Elysee," they were widely ignored by the French people, according to Agnes Poirier of the Guardian.

Chirac's predecessor, François Mitterrand, had a daughter out of wedlock with his mistress. When a journalist asked him about the illegitimate child, Mazarine Pingeot, he reportedly replied, "So what?"

Mitterrand's predecessor Valery Giscard d'Estaing was also known for his sexual dalliances. In 2009 he published a book called "The Princess and the President," about a love affair between a French president and a British princess. Naturally, it lead to speculations that Princess Diana had had an affair with Giscard, a famously vain man who no doubt relished the thought alone.

Sexually wayward leaders is a French leitmotif stretching back at least to little Napoleon, who considered power the greatest aphrodisiac.

With that checkered history behind it, Flammarion's Carla Bruni tome will likely do little more than add another chapter to a long-running tradition.