and his editor knew it the day he went to prison. Exactly one month after being released and having spent only three weeks behind bars, the former French president has published Diary of a prisoner (Fayard), a book about his fleeting prison journey that is already another best-seller. “Number 1 in all categories before leaving,” the author himself celebrated this Wednesday before the success of his 13th title, a settling of scores with the system and a blessing to the French far-right. If it were up to him, he says in his particular prison portrait, the “cordon sanitaire” would have to end. Marine Le Pen’s National Regrouping (RN) “is not a danger to the Republic,” he writes.
The book is made up of 212 pages where inmate 320,535 – the number assigned to him – breaks down in detail his three weeks of detention in (Paris) surrounded by “rapists, Islamist terrorists, murderers and drug traffickers.” A place that could look like a “cheap hotel, except for the armored door and bars.” The former head of state, released on November 10 after having been sentenced to prison between 2005 and 2007, wrote by hand, in sheets, with a Bic pen. His lawyer then took them to the politician’s secretary so that she could clean them up and adopt the form of his new best seller.
Sarkozy describes his entry into prison and the deafening noise of the prison, especially at night. He explains how he was received in a threatening manner by other prisoners. But also his austere and monotonous life. The former president ate yogurt and cereal bars (so that other prisoners would not spill anything on his food), he had to bend down to shave in a 12-square-meter cell, number 11, and he describes a shower with a small trickle of water and “a mattress harder than that of military service.”
The conservative leader in the book. He received 22,000 letters sent both by anonymous people moved by his situation and by figures such as the writer Michel Houellebecq. But I had no cell phone or tablet and many limitations to being able to make phone calls. The only newspapers he asked for were the conservative Le Figaro, very close to his figure, and the sports The Team. The good news, he explains, is that he had CANAL+ and was able to watch PSG matches, his favorite team, from the first night of his incarceration.
Sarkozy’s book, beyond a simple chronicle of his “gray” days in prison, is also a bitter reckoning with part of the system that condemned him. But also a political pamphlet with some of the ideas that insistently hover over , such as the rapprochement that many voices are beginning to promote with the extreme right of , who called the former head of state during his imprisonment.
The former president, who (compares the false evidence that convicted the Jewish soldier with the newspaper’s information Mediapart that triggered his case), reveals in his diary that he spoke by phone from prison with Marine Le Pen, once a fierce rival. “We do not share the same ideas regarding economic policy, we do not share the same history… and I notice that there may still be some problematic figures among them. But they represent many French people, they respect the results of the elections and participate in the functioning of our democracy,” he analyzes.
Furthermore, he promised Le Pen in that call not to call a republican front in the event of early legislative elections. Carla Bruni’s husband invokes the end “of” that his mentor and also former president of France, Jacques Chirac, had radically promoted. “The RN does not constitute any danger to the Republic. Many of its voters today were mine when I was in active politics. Insulting their voters is insulting ours. My former political formation is not in a position of strength today. It cannot right now hope to embody the future, it will even have difficulties to be in the second round of elections. The path of reconstruction will be long, but it can only go through a spirit of regrouping that is as broad as possible, without exclusions or anathemas,” he affirms.
The politician had already received , president of the RN, this summer, openly endorsing the supposed normalization of the far-right party. Sarkozy now argues that rebuilding his weakened Republican Party “can only be achieved through the broadest possible spirit of unity.”
The far-right’s courtship of Sarkozy—still very influential in the traditional French right and the decisions it makes—is evident in the book. Also its fruits. One of Le Pen’s closest collaborators, Sébastien Chenu, wrote periodic letters to the former head of state. “The content was human, sensitive, personal, without partisan political consideration,” the former president is excited. “I will not forget the surprise that it caused me and the well-being that it gave me,” he says, confirming a personal proximity to Le Pen’s entourage and an approach in which many see the definitive green light to reach future electoral pacts between The Republicans and the RN.
Sarkozy also mentions his former friendship with the president, Emmanuel Macron. The two men met at the Elysée presidential palace a few days before Sarkozy went to prison. Macron, the book records, raised security concerns at La Santé prison—even telling him that they could not guarantee it—and offered to transfer him to another facility, which he rejected. Instead, two police officers were assigned to the neighboring cell to protect him 24 hours a day.
The former president writes that he lost confidence in Macron after the president did not intervene to prevent the withdrawal of the , France’s highest distinction, in June. But he also criticizes the political decision to dissolve the National Assembly in June 2024. “A whim that did as much damage to France as to its author.” In fact, he predicted to Le Pen that a new dissolution would not take long to occur. [una hipótesis que se aleja tras la del Estado este martes].
Sarkozy also became convinced of the Catholic religion in prison. And as promised, when he left he went to the Marian sanctuary of Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees. In the book he recounts that “unexpected spiritual experience” with the prison chaplain who granted him communion on the first Sunday of his detention. The politician plans to receive him for lunch in a few days at his offices on Rue de Miromesnil, in Paris.
“I am not a violent man or an aggressor. I have paid my taxes scrupulously. I was for 20 years the mayor of a large city, Neuilly-sur-Seine, without ever […] there would have been the slightest incident. What could happen to me? Unless he had an overblown imagination or cartoonish paranoia, nothing. The following pages will prove my mistake.” Indeed, Sarkozy is not a murderer. But what weighs on him is that they make it difficult to think of a plot.
On November 26, the Supreme Court confirmed his 2012 campaign. Last December, the same judicial instance also made another sentence final for a case of corruption and influence peddling, for trying to obtain favors from a senior magistrate in one of the cases opened against him. By that ruling, between last February and May. And if the reforms that he wanted to implement during his mandate had been approved, he would not even be on the street today.
