Carla Bruni-Sarkozy arrived at the Élysée Palace in 2008 as the most unconventional first lady in the recent history of Western democracies — a former supermodel and successful pop singer who had been photographed by some of the world's most famous photographers, had been the public companion of several prominent men before her marriage to Nicolas Sarkozy, and had spoken in interviews with a frankness about sexuality and relationships that French public life was accustomed to in theory but not entirely prepared for in the first lady context.

The French press's relationship with Bruni-Sarkozy was characteristically French — interested, occasionally barbed, but fundamentally accepting of the idea that a woman's personal history before marriage was not an appropriate target for sustained moral commentary. The American right's intermittent attempts to make her past a scandal found little purchase in France, where the philosophical separation between a public figure's private life and their public role is more deeply embedded in political culture than it is elsewhere.

What Bruni brought to the first lady role was an established creative identity that did not require the role for its expression. She continued recording and releasing music as Carla Bruni, not as Madame Sarkozy. Her albums — the sparse, folk-inflected recordings that had established her as a significant figure in French chanson — were reviewed on their musical merits rather than as first-lady projects. This separation between her creative life and her political role was something she defended actively and that distinguished her from first ladies whose public identities were largely defined by the position.

The Italian-French identity she embodied — born in Turin, raised partly in Geneva, a French citizen who sang in French and English — was itself a kind of European project, a life that had crossed borders in ways that the continent's post-war political architecture was designed to make possible.