Before its arrival in bookstores, this Wednesday, the (Diary of a prisoner), the former French president’s story about his three weeks in prison, was already the leader in pre-sales on online platforms.
A guaranteed success that was confirmed yesterday afternoon in a central bookstore in Paris, the first stop on his tour throughout the country to sign copies of what promises to be one of the Christmas sensations, where he took a mass bath, an exercise with which he seeks to wash his image as an ex-convict.
Hundreds of people queued at the doors of the Lamartine bookstore, in the conservative 16th district of the capital, hours before the arrival of Sarkozy who avoided two militants of the movement, before greeting many of his supporters.
A strong police force guaranteed a scene more typical of a singing star than of a leader who abandoned the political front line ten years ago and who has accumulated three convictions, two of them final, for corruption and irregular financing of his presidential campaigns.
The largest of them, for having received money from the Libyan regime in the campaign that led him to the Elysée in 2007, led him to a short stint in the Parisian prison of La Santé, three weeks that made him the first former French president behind bars.
From that stay, shortened by his high age, 70 years, a story was born with which he assures that he wants to influence his innocence, the same discourse that he has maintained after each of the sentences against him, which do not seem to erode his solid popularity among a part of French society. “As long as I have a breath of life left, I will fight with all my strength to prove my innocence, no matter how long it takes,” Sarkozy writes in that book, with which he intends to repeat throughout the country the images of popular support that accompanied him in Paris.
“As long as I have a breath of life left, I will fight with all my might to prove my innocence, no matter how long it takes.”
Marseille will be his second stop, also in a bookstore located in the noblest area of the city, where the conservative electorate is the majority, before moving to Cannes and Menton, another Mediterranean city where his son Louis is a candidate for mayor in next year’s municipal elections.
Because in addition to a way of showing that his popularity has resisted the blows of Justice, A prisoner’s diary It also serves as a political instrument in which Sarkozy declines some of his positions regarding the current situation.
Sarkozy, a brand that sells
The Sarkozy brand continues to sell and the proof of this is that the current delegate minister for European Affairs, the macronist Benjamin Haddad, deputy for the western Paris constituency where the Lamartine bookstore is located, attended this first promotional event.
And throughout the 216 pages of the book it is clear that relations with the current president, , have stopped being as friendly as before, when he was regularly received at the Elysée.
Sarkozy claims to have “turned the page” on that friendship and reveals that in prison he received a call from the far-right leader, whom he assured that he would not support a cordon sanitaire against his party.
A position that, he affirms, he will maintain when Macron, whom he says he predicted a bad end to his mandate, is forced to bring forward the legislative elections, something that he also plans to say to the Prime Minister, whom he assures he will receive in the coming days.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy leaves his home with his wife, Carla Bruni, to head to La Santé prison, on October 21, 2025.
The anecdote
The book is not just a political manifesto. He also tells of the “ordeal” of prisoner 320535 in a 12 square meter cell from which he only left to play sports and to meet four days a week with a family member, almost always his wife. In prison, he also received a visit from his former colleague and current Minister of Justice, Gerald Darmanin, which provoked harsh criticism in the country. According to the book, he also received messages and calls of support from world leaders and ambassadors.
Sarkozy stated that the US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, also requested to meet him for the first time in prison. Kushner Sr., later pardoned by Trump, served time for tax evasion, retaliation against a federal witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission.
“The whole environment breathed sadness, the disaster of lives crammed into these walls, far from the world of the living,” says Sarkozy, who enjoyed special treatment, away from the rest of the prisoners and under the constant attentive surveillance of two police officers.
The former president assures that he entered without a written page and that it was in prison where with a black pen he outlined the story that is on its way to becoming a bestseller. It tells of the noise that breaks the silence at every moment, the gray of the walls, the shower that barely lets a trickle of water fall…
Sarkozy narrates monotonous days in which he eats tuna and energy bars and in which, in addition to writing, he reads, especially the Bible that he discovers after an “unexpected” meeting with the prison chaplain and which has also become his bedside book after leaving La Santé.
It helped, but not entirely, in the middle of “hell”: the view from his window, he explains, was blocked by plastic panels, it was impossible to see the sky or even know what the weather was like. At night, he was tormented by the boos of his fellow prisoners, which echoed throughout the prison complex, he writes. One night, he woke up when an inmate set fire to a nearby cell.
It was a far cry from the luxury he enjoyed as head of state of France between 2007 and 2012. “Sitting on the bed that was not made, I was shocked. I had never felt, not even during my military service in the armed forces, such a hard mattress. A table would have been softer,” he says. Still, like other inmates in the so-called “VIP wing,” which is made up of 18 cells, he enjoyed a private television, shower, refrigerator and a grill. “No one sees them. No one meets with them,” he maintains, despite these conditions being somewhat better than those of the rest of the prisoners.
The case
Convicted of corruption in March 2024 and last November for illicit financing of his 2012 campaign, Sarkozy remains an influential figure in French politics.
Released under judicial control as he is now, he will return to the dock on March 16, for the appeal trial for Libyan financing of his 2007 campaign.
By then, A prisoner’s diarypublished by a publishing house owned by ultra-conservative businessman Vincent Bolloré, will already be a bestseller, like the twelve books he wrote before.
