In a country where mistresses are practically an official institution, President Clinton's testimony before a grand jury and televised confession on Monday night met with total incredulity.
The US, so the French fear, is neglecting its international role while reverting to the puritanical New England of the Pilgrim Fathers. Yet press coverage has not been without humour. Le Monde questioned whether Mr Clinton would admit to un contact buccogenital with the former White House intern. Elle magazine equipped its cut-out Monica Lewinsky doll with teflon jeans, resistant to presidential stains.
The communist daily L'Humanite called Mr Kenneth Starr's interrogation of Mr Clinton "below the belt". Liberation published a cartoon of a man peering into the presidential trousers. "He's right - it doesn't look like a sex organ," the cartoon character is saying. "It looks like an Achilles' heel."
Across the political spectrum and among the public, however, events in Washington provoked more disgust than humour. Mr Starr was compared to Savonarola, Torquemada and Ayatollah Khomeini. "God save America," the tabloid France Soir said. "She really needs saving." The US's enemies could act with impunity. "With an ayatollah like Kenneth Starr who doesn't smoke, doesn't drink and reads the Bible every morning, the efficiency of the battle against American interests is ensured," the newspaper concluded, adding that at least in France political debate is based on ideas.
Le Figaro's front-page editorial fretted that US institutions have been irreparably damaged by the scandal. "The events of yesterday were a heavy blow to (Mr Clinton), to the US presidency and to the democratic system once praised by Tocqueville . . . What is called the greatest democracy in the world has sunk, these past weeks, into a hallucinatory, collective delirium," the right-wing daily said.
"The American judicial system has gone off the rails and shown the absurdity of its omnipotence. The criminalisation of lying is the legacy of American Protestant culture."
Mr Jack Lang, the former Socialist minister for culture and the head of the National Assembly's foreign affairs committee, told French radio it was outrageous that "Mr Clinton's sex organ has become the centre of the universe". Mr Lang was pleased that Hollywood has defended the US President, and has offered to mobilise French actors and writers to denounce Mr Starr.
Prof Nicole Bacharan, who teaches US politics at the Institut des Sciences Politiques, compared the investigation into Mr Clinton's sex life with the Salem witch trials and the 1950s persecution of suspected communists by Senator Joe McCarthy. "This will be remembered as a shameful period in American history," she said. "The French are altogether realistic, and a bit cynical. They don't expect people to be honest - especially not politicians."
In recent days, French media have speculated on Mr and Mrs Clinton's sleeping arrangements - a liberty never taken with their own politicians. It was widely known, for example, that the late president Francois Mitterrand had a long-term mistress. Their adult daughter, Mazarine, stood beside Mr Mitterrand's "legal" family at his funeral.
An earlier French president, Felix Faure, died in his Elysee Palace office in 1899 while indulging in what Mr Clinton would call "an improper relationship" with the wife of a famous painter. The encyclopaedia notes tactfully that Mr Faure died au cours d'une aventure galante. The circumstances of his death did not prevent the city of Paris naming a major avenue for him.