Arya News - For every 24 hours behind bars, Nicolas Sarkozy wrote more than 10 pages of his new book recounting his stint in Paris’ La Santé Prison.
Twenty days, 213 pages.
For every 24 hours behind bars, Nicolas Sarkozy wrote more than 10 pages of his new book recounting his stint in Paris’ La Santé Prison.
“It could have been a budget hotel, if you ignored the armored door with its eyehole,” the former French president recalls in the book, which hit shelves Wednesday, one month after he left jail on November 10.
Prison was “hell,” Sarkozy writes in “Diary of a Prisoner,” which rides the waves of intense public interest and scrutiny around his September conviction for criminal conspiracy to finance his 2007 campaign with funds from Libya.
He was released early from his five-year sentence in November pending his appeal.
The view out of his window was blocked by plastic panels, Sarkozy says of his time incarcerated, adding that it was impossible to see the sky or even tell the weather. At night, he was hounded by the jeers of fellow prisoners, echoing around the prison complex, he writes. One night, he was woken when an inmate set fire to a nearby cell.
Hard time
It was a far cry from the luxury he enjoyed as France’s head of state between 2007 and 2012.
“Sitting on the bed, which hadn’t been made, I had a shock. I had never felt, even during my military service in the army, a harder mattress. A table would have almost been softer,” he wrote. Still, like other prisoners in the so-called VIP wing, which consists of 18 cells, he enjoyed a private TV, shower, fridge and cooking hob.
A copy of "Diary of a Prisoner." - Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
The book chronicles his daily life in prison, interspersed with throwbacks to the weeks between his sentencing and his arrival at the gates of La Santé on October 21.
In France, much was made of the official audiences offered to Sarkozy post-conviction.
He was invited to the presidential palace – in a meeting that Sarkozy said resulted in French President Emmanuel Macron insisting he accept a move to another prison, where he would be housed in an “apartment for the families of inmates.” Sarkozy said he refused the offer.
In prison, too, he was visited by former colleague and current justice minister, Gerald Darmanin, provoking sharp rebukes from many in France. Messages and calls of support from world leaders and ambassadors came too, according to the book.
Sarkozy said the US ambassador in Paris, Charles Kushner, father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, also requested to meet him for the first time in prison. Kushner senior, later pardoned by Trump, served time for tax evasion, retaliating against a federal witness and lying to the Federal Electoral Commission.
Sarkozy signs a copy of his book "Diary of a Prisoner" for a reader on the day of its release at the Lamartine bookshop in Paris on Wednesday. - Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images
With face-to-face meetings with his family at least once every other day, the reality of Sarkozy’s time in jail is a far cry from how he describes life for inmates in the so-called VIP or isolation wing of the prison. “No one sees them. No one meets them,” he writes.
Rebirth
For Sarkozy, the book is an attempt to detox his image.
Gone are past polemics calling for tough justice. French courts “must punish, because when you’re a thug, it’s even worse to be a high-ranking thug than a low-ranking one,” the law-and-order president said in 2012.
In their place are rosy accounts of his life post-conviction.
He details taking a teenage cancer patient to a soccer game a few days before heading to prison and receiving applause in restaurants. He says football fans showered him with support and recalls families lining the streets as his prison convoy escorted him to jail – a parallel to the crowds that cheered him on the night of his presidential election, he says.
The former French president and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy leave their home on October 21 in Paris as Sarkozy heads to prison. - Thibault Camus/AP
Prison staff were overwhelmed by his fan mail, including 20 bibles, 30 copies of the same award-winning novel, hundreds of letters daily – “more than ever I received as president,” he writes.
For those tempted to suspect an overdramatization of his time as a convict, the first line of the book warns, “this is not a novel.”
A presidential convict
Determined in his self-professed innocence, Sarkozy dedicates half a chapter to decrying the journalistic investigation that led to his eventual conviction.
In November, France’s highest court upheld his conviction in a separate case related to illegal financing of his 2012 reelection campaign. He is one of the very few modern political leaders to have seen the inside of a jail cell as an inmate.
Incredibly, he compares himself to Alfred Dreyfus, a former prisoner at La Santé and the cause celèbre for wrongful persecution in France. A victim of vicious antisemitism, France later tried to undo the wrongs inflicted upon Dreyfus.
Visits from the prison chaplain each Sunday are milestones in Sarkozy’s 20-day stint behind bars. And the former president professes rekindling his faith, buoyed by the biography of Jesus Christ he took into his cell. He also brough two volumes of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a legendary jailbreaker.
Police secure the exterior of La Santé Prison ahead of the arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy on October 21, 2025 in Paris, France. - Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
The right-wing politician appears undeniably moved by his jailtime. Touched by the care of the staff, as well as the drab reality of time behind bars, the pain of the separation from his family is clear. So, too, is his newfound appreciation of all he lost: “In La Santé, I restarted my life,” is how he ends the book.
But absent from the 213 pages is almost any empathy for his fellow prisoners. He stakes himself as a man apart both literally – isolated from his fellow prisoners and treated with some deference by staff – and metaphorically, an innocent man living the “unthinkable,” he claims.
“I had entered (prison) as a head of state. I left with the same rank,” Sarkozy writes in his book’s final pages, reminiscing over the swarm of police, media and supporters that bookended his time in prison.
The reality of Sarkozy’s jailtime is a little more sobering. He had entered as a convict. He left with the same rank.
Additional reporting by Philippe Cordier.
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