THE new album by la première dame de France has been released and the Gallic music press loves it. All of France is enraptured by it, in fact, from the security guards on the Eiffel Tour to all those families bombing down the "autoroute du soleil" at 160km per hour to celebrate Bastille Day beside the swimming pools of their Provençal gites.

Having lived in France for four years, I count myself as an almost kneejerk Francophile but Bruni's album, Comme Si De Rien N'Etait ("As If Nothing Has Happened") is a bridge too far. Unusually, I find my allegiance transferring rapidly to this side of the Channel. There's a clue to its genre in the record label: Naive. A few bars of that breathy, weedy, little-girl-lost, Birkinesque voice and I'm screaming "Put a sock in it Carla!" and reaching for Amy Winehouse.

Being Italian - although she now apparently considers herself French - Bruni comes from a country fixated on "la bella figura", a national obsession that has intensified since the heyday of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. Thanks to the Berlusconi effect, Italian television channels are fronted by a line-up of pouting, voluptuous beauties, even when the subject is diplomatic relations with Iran.

Now, I do know that the French have a fatal fondness for any wistful young chanteuse with a pre-pubescent fringe and big, feline "aren't men wonderful" eyes. Françoise Hardy was tolerable in the sixties, but enough already of Carla. With all that whimpering and simpering, listening to her sing is like taking a bath in liquefied marrons glacés.

To be honest, Carla has been getting on my nerves for a while. I might have overlooked that demure-but-secretly-flirtatious gamine convent-girl look, demonstrated particularly by that pillbox hat seen on the couple's UK visit, were it not that her taste in men is so lamentable.

Leathery-wrinkled Mick Jagger, bouffant-ed Donald Trump, for heaven's sake. And it's not as if she even needs the dosh: she's got enough of her own already.

Still left-leaning apparently, she's hitched to Sarkozy, that evil, venomous little man whom I last caught up with on YouTube being secretly recorded expounding his philosophy that black immigrants in France were even more of a problem than the Islamist ones.

OK, it means that you can expect a free and frank marital exchange of views over the breakfast table of a morning, but some gulfs are just too wide. Who wants to share a baguette with a partner who advocates the DNA testing of immigrants?

If embracing Sarko wasn't bad enough, you'd think the Women's Movement had never happened. Stepford Wives had nothing on Carla with her Sarko-inspired lyrics like "you are my orgy, my folly, my blessed bread, my charming prince I, who always sought fire, am burning for you like a pagan woman. I give you my body, my soul and my chrysanthemum".

By turns brazen and coy, these lines may send otherwise sensible men mad with desire.

But please, please, please, give the rest of us a break. Like most epistles penned in the heat of "nuclear" love affairs, this should be for private consumption only. She makes Tammy Wynette look right-on. Bruni is clearly not a sister; never rely on her turning up for an equal pay march.

And then there's all that toe-curling, whimsical, age-defying stuff. In one track, Je Suis Une Enfant, Bruni breathlessly whispers "I turn my back on time hair and skirt to the wind" and by now I'm seeing an image of Julie Andrews in a dirndl skirt running over Alpine pastures.

Bien sur, Carla's looking good for her 40 years and her portfolio of 30 rich old bloke lovers, but there does come a time, even in France, when a woman has to cultivate more of a Catherine Deneuve sophistication or Juliette Binoche-style chic, not moon around like a lovelorn adolescent at Glastonbury.

It seems we have Cherie Blair to blame for this album. It was she who apparently counselled Bruni to resume her music career, and never neglect it for the role of the presidential wife. More evidence of how Cherie reliably gets it wrong.

With material like this, Bruni may be one of the very few women best suited to staying at home and crooning to the babies in the bathtub.

I have some support for my disapproval of Bruni from Colombia's foreign minister, who takes exception to Bruni's description of Sarkozy as "more lethal than heroin from Afghanistan and more dangerous than Colombian white". For once, I have to agree with her words, if not her intention. Of course, there's no evidence to suggest that Bruni indulges in Class A drugs - unlike our own, deeply flawed and troubled Amy Winehouse.

Like a line of tragic female singers before her, she'll do a fair amount of wallowing over husband Blake while in the grip of addictive substances. But I'll forgive her for all that because she's got guts, grit and a big, wonderful voice to belt it out, which Madame Sarkozy most certainly has not.