FRANCE’S first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, has said her husband was thoughtless in flaunting their relationship soon after it started last Christmas. She said the storm of negative publicity that followed was a “terrible” ordeal.

The Italian singer, 40, described herself in an interview in the left-wing newspaper Libération as instinctively on the political left despite her marriage four months ago to the centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The interview was published yesterday. Her third album will be released next month.

She is credited by friends with injecting “class and culture” into Sarkozy, whose image was as a flashy President Bling-Bling who craved Ray-Ban sunglasses, Rolex watches and luxury holidays.

Soon after falling in love at a dinner party, he flew Bruni to Egypt and Jordan. Opinion polls said voters thought he was too preoccupied with his private life.

She said: “Rather than being bling-bling, maybe he was thoughtless, as far as I was concerned. I tried to understand what had happened, why things had been so awful at the best time [at the start of a relationship]. For a couple, it was terrible.”

She added that his style was now more sober than a year ago: “That’s important for someone in his position.” Political analysts agree that she has helped Sarkozy to project a calmer, more sensitive image.

Meeting him plunged her into an alien world of “conservative people, who were deeply shocked by the arrival of a girl who isn’t French, isn’t married, who had lived freely in the past and has a child”. Bruni has a son, Aurélien, 6, from a previous relationship with Raphaël Enthoven, the philosopher.

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