Nicolas Sarkozy’s three weeks behind bars were marked by “greyness and solitude,” the former French president writes in excerpts from a prison memoir due next month — a personal chronicle that recounts prayer, confinement and the small routines that became a lifeline after his conviction in a Libya-related campaign financing case.
The 216-page book, titled “Diary of a Prisoner” and scheduled for release Dec. 10, offers the first extended account of Sarkozy’s time at La Santé prison after his October conviction for allowing aides to seek funds for his 2007 presidential campaign from Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi. Sarkozy, 70, was sentenced to five years but served 20 days before being released with restrictions when an appeals court ruled he posed no flight risk.
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Excerpts published in French media this weekend give a tightly focused portrait of days reduced to habit and reflection. “I would have given anything to be able to look out the window, to enjoy watching the cars go by,” he wrote, describing the claustrophobic rhythm of a cell life that left him confined 23 hours a day except for visiting hours. He said he was guarded by two security officers throughout his detention.
The former center-right leader, who governed France from 2007 to 2012 and remains an influential figure on the political right, said prison taught him about others and himself. “It’s often said that you learn at any age. That’s true because I learned a great deal at La Sante prison, about others as well as about myself,” the book excerpts say.
Small details recur in the excerpts: the austere diet of “dairy products, cereal bars, mineral water, apple juice, and a few sweet treats,” a plywood table upon which he wrote daily with a ballpoint pen, and the private rituals that punctured the monotony. On his first night, after watching a football match, he knelt in prayer. “It came naturally,” he wrote. “I stayed like that for several minutes. I prayed for the strength to bear the cross of this injustice.”
The phrasing — prayer framed as consolation, the table as a narrow desk of creation — is presented as part confession, part argument. Sarkozy has long maintained his innocence. The memoir’s release arrives as his legal saga continues: an appeal trial is set to begin in March, and the conviction that sent him to prison is only one of several cases that have dogged him since he left the Élysée Palace.
Political allies and rivals will likely parse the memoir for how it reframes a fallen leader. For supporters, the book may be read as an intimate vindication, an account of unfair treatment and endurance. For critics, the same passages could reinforce findings by courts that have judged his conduct unlawful. Either way, the personal tone of the journal invites readers into the private interior of a public figure who has long cultivated an image of toughness and combative energy.
There is an evident tension in the excerpts between the desire to narrate what happened and the larger legal context that prompted the incarceration. The memoir documents the sensory diminutions of prison life — the limited food, the hours of immobility — alongside flashes of memory and reflection that aim to locate that time within a longer political biography.
Sarkozy’s description of writing “with a ballpoint pen on a small plywood table every day” underlines how the book itself is part of the prison’s afterlife: the text emerges directly from the confined hours it recounts. He said much of the manuscript was completed while still behind bars and finished after his release on Nov. 10.
That provenance will shape public reception. A memoir penned in the very room it describes carries an authenticity that can be persuasive, but it also invites scrutiny about motive. The timing — publication ahead of an appeal trial — will inevitably be read through a political lens, particularly because Sarkozy’s voice still carries weight on the French right and within the broader debate over accountability for political leaders.
Beyond politics, the book touches on universal themes: solitude, ritual, the search for dignity under constraint. The image of a former head of state kneeling to pray after a football match is a stark humanizing detail that cuts across partisan lines, even as it is framed by his insistence that he bore “the cross of this injustice.”
La Santé, the setting for these episodes, is frequently invoked in French public life as a symbol of deprivation and punitive routine. Whether readers look for exposition on the legal saga that brought him there, or for the interior experience of being stripped of status and taken into confinement, Sarkozy’s journal promises a combination of both.
The memoir’s release will reinforce the narrative thread that has run through Sarkozy’s post-presidential years: sustained legal challenge, personal resilience and a persistent claim to political relevance. As France moves toward a new round of electoral and legal reckonings, the book adds a private layer to a public story that remains far from over.
For now, the passages made public offer a portrait of manhood under constraint — a former president reduced to small comforts, prayer and the scratch of a pen — and a preview of the arguments he will make as he seeks to overturn his conviction in the months ahead.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
