Carla Bruni has released her first album since becoming France's First Lady in which she sings of 30 past lovers and compares one of them to taking drugs

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has released her first album since becoming France's First Lady, dedicating a song to her President husband.

But she insists her album, in which she sings of 30 lovers and hard drugs,  was not inspired by her whirlwind romance and marriage to  Nicolas Sarkozy.

In one track from As if Nothing Had Happened, which is due for release on July 21, she sings: 'I am yours, if they diss me or damn me, I don't care a hoot.'

Sarkozy's political aides hope the album will be a major boost for her President husband Nicolas Sarkozy.

And rather than embarrass her husband, her work is likely to give him a boost due to 'the Carla effect', following the couple's successful state visit to London in March.

France's First Lady sings lyrics which include: 'You are my dope, more lethal than Afghan heroin, more dangerous than Colombian powder,' and 'I am a child/Despite my 40 years/Despite my 30 lovers/A child.'

Top French newspaper Le Figaro said the distinctive melodies and bold lyrics on Bruni's her first album since she wed Sarkozy, were a new departure from plain folk and a musical success.

Le Figaro critic Bertrand Dicale said Bruni has 'come of age as a songstress and embraces  more recognisably French styles and the flamboyance of the 1960s'.

It is her third album since turning from top model to musician, and her first since she married Sarkozy in February.

Bruni has repeatedly said she wrote the songs before meeting Sarkozy, so listeners should not look to the lyrics for clues about her feelings for the French president.

Political aides hope the release of the album will be a major boost for the president

The recently divorced Sarkozy, 53, and Bruni, 40, began dating in November, revealed their relationship in December in a worldwide blaze of publicity, and tied the knot in February.

The massive media exposure of Sarkozy's private life was one of the contributing factors in a popularity slump that saw his ratings plunge to record lows in the first months of this year.

In response, he has tried to talk less about his personal life but interest remains high and hardly a week goes by without new intimate pictures of Bruni and Sarkozy at the presidential Elysee palace appearing in the press.

Bruni now signs her name "Bruni-Sarkozy", but on the album cover she appears as Carla Bruni.

In an interview also published on Wednesday in celebrity magazine VSD, Bruni says she is painfully aware of the pitfalls of her dual role as artist and first lady.

'Perceptions will not only be musical. Criticism, which is useful, risks being blurred, for good or for bad, by the fact that I am the president's wife,' she told the magazine.

'I have had to protect myself. I made the album in a bubble with my musical entourage,' she said.

Yet she appears confident enough in song, if not in life.

'They can curse me, they can damn me, I don't care," she sings in another one of the songs, quoted by Le Figaro.