France, where politicians joke that the phrase "sex scandal" is a contradiction in terms, passed scathing judgment on the US at the weekend for making President Clinton's affairs into a world crisis.
Stupefaction, mixed with a fascination for Mr Clinton's sexual past and political future, bristled through front-page coverage of Kenneth Starr's report. Commentators denounced the independent counsel as a "moral Ayatollah" and "a legal Doctor Strangelove", while Mr Clinton was portrayed as everything from a tragic fool to a bad boy caught in the spider's web of the Internet that published the report.
"Hell is American", the leading daily Le Monde wrote in an editorial about America's "new McCarthyism, which has replaced the panicky fear of communism with the dread of sexuality".
"Monicagate is a surrealist vaudeville because it telescopes two previously separate universes of sexual intimacy and the constitutional order - affairs of the flesh and of state wind up under the same sheets," the left-wing Liberation wrote.
The report's prompt worldwide publication on the Internet also raised eyebrows in France, where politicians' sex lives are a private affair and senior leaders have long enjoyed an informal immunity from the legal troubles Mr Clinton faces.
"This is the global village," philosopher Alain Finkielkraut told LCI television, "and the village, contrary to the city, has always been a place where conformity, narrowminded snooping, denunciation, gossip and poison-pen letters reign. This is what we see with the Internet now."
The contrast between French and US views of sex scandals was so great that some commentators felt they had to point out the difference to their own compatriots. "We have a very French way of looking at things," Le Monde editorial director Edwy Plenel explained. "We think a president who has affairs is charming."
Several news organisations posted the English-language text of the Starr report and the White House rebuttal on their Web sites and had translators working through the night to complete a full French text. Le Monde printed 16 pages of excerpts.
In an editorial bristling with astonishment at the scandal, Le Monde described Mr Starr's report as a "monster . . . worthy of the reports of the Inquisition . . . where deviants and heretics were hunted down to the depths of their souls".
"In a famous speech in the 1960s, when America seemed to want to shed its prejudices, the black leader Martin Luther King said he had had a dream," it wrote. "On Friday, September 11th, 1998, the United States and with it the whole world had a nightmare. By the magic of the Internet, the four corners of our universe were turned into a planetary audience and we all became peeping Toms by the choice of the American Congress."
The conservative daily Le Figaro ran a damning editorial entitled "Gulliver Trapped", in which it berated Mr Clinton for the damage done to the world's only superpower.
"Bill Clinton's escapades have created a new world order!" it wrote. "Ten years after crushing communism, the power of the United States collapses before that of the Internet. American influence on events on this planet seems reduced to nothing . . . The White House is nothing more than an empty shell now.
"If Clinton had preferred discreet ladies to overly talkative young interns, he could have convinced Boris Yeltsin to hunt the robber barons who, after robbing Russia, now risk throwing it back into the communist noose.
"If Clinton had asked for pardon right after his first lie, he might have been able to have Benjamin Netanyahu keep Israel's promises to the Palestinians."