When former French president Nicolas Sarkozy walked through the gates of Paris’s La Santé prison, he was not just entering a cell—he was stepping into an ordeal that would reshape his public image and send ripples through France’s political landscape. Now, his experience is laid bare in his newly released memoir, Diary of a Prisoner, a 216-page account written with remarkable speed and intensity during his 20-day incarceration. The book, published on December 10, 2025, provides an unflinching look at life behind bars for a man who once held the nation’s highest office—and it’s already causing a stir from the corridors of power to the streets of Paris.
Sarkozy’s memoir is as much a personal reckoning as it is a political statement. According to France 24, he describes the prison as “hell,” a place of “deafening noise” and “inhuman violence.” The former president, sentenced in September to five years for illegal campaign financing—specifically, for accepting funds from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi to win the 2007 election—spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. “Welcome to hell!” he writes, recalling the moment he opened his cell window and heard another inmate “relentlessly striking the bars of his cell with a metal object.”
His cell, measuring just 12 square meters, was equipped with a bed, a desk, a fridge, a shower, and a television. But any resemblance to comfort ended there. The window was blocked by a massive plastic panel, ensuring that not even the sky or weather could be glimpsed from inside. “It was clean and light enough,” Sarkozy notes in Diary of a Prisoner, “One could almost have thought one was in a bottom-of-the-range hotel—were it not for the reinforced door with an eye-hole for the prison guards to look through.” The mattress, he adds, was so hard that “even a table would be softer.”
The isolation, though cushioned with some amenities, was profound. Sarkozy’s only regular visitors were his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and his lawyers. Prison staff, he writes, treated him with “kindness, delicacy and respect,” always addressing him as “Président.” Yet the reality was far from dignified. Nights were punctuated by taunts and noise—on his first night, a neighbor sang a song from The Lion King and rattled a spoon along the cell bars, keeping him awake. Once, a fire broke out in a neighboring cell. The meals, served in small plastic trays, were so unappetizing that Sarkozy survived mostly on dairy products and cereal bars.
Support from the outside world filtered in through letters and postcards, which he used to cover the walls of his cell. “Touching and sincere, it bore witness to a deep personal bond even though I’d left office so long ago,” he reflects. Visits from family arrived almost every other day, and he received messages from world leaders and ambassadors. According to CNN, the American ambassador to Paris, Charles Kushner, requested a meeting during Sarkozy’s imprisonment—a request that underscored the international attention surrounding his case.
Despite the relative privileges of his VIP status—private television, a refrigerator, and a shower—the emotional toll was immense. Sarkozy writes that he was “shocked” by the harshness of his environment, noting, “I had never felt, not even during my military service, such a hard mattress.” The enforced solitude and the relentless noise led him to question the French prison system’s ability to rehabilitate inmates. “The most inhumane violence was the daily reality of this place,” he says, raising difficult questions about reintegration after release.
His time in prison also prompted a new perspective on crime and punishment. Known for his tough-on-crime stance as president, Sarkozy now promises, “upon my release, my comments would be more elaborate and nuanced than what I had previously expressed on all these topics.”
The memoir is not just a diary of suffering but a platform for Sarkozy to mount a defense against the charges that landed him in jail. He continues to deny any wrongdoing, claiming to be the victim of a politically motivated conspiracy. According to BBC, he compares his plight to that of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer famously wronged by the French justice system in the 19th century. “For any impartial observer who knows their history, the similarities are striking,” Sarkozy writes. “The Dreyfus affair originated from fake documents. So did mine… Dreyfus was degraded in front of the troops, when they stripped him of his decorations. I was dismissed from the Legion of Honour, in front of the whole nation.”
His dismissal from the Legion of Honour—France’s highest distinction—by President Emmanuel Macron became a personal sore point. Sarkozy criticizes Macron for not having “the courage” to call him personally to explain the decision. “Had he telephoned, I would have understood his arguments and accepted the decision,” Sarkozy writes. “Not doing it showed his motives were at the very least insincere.” The two men met at the Élysée Palace just days before Sarkozy’s incarceration, during which Macron, citing security concerns, offered to transfer him to another facility. Sarkozy declined, choosing to remain at La Santé, where two police officers were assigned to the neighboring cell for his protection.
Perhaps the most politically explosive passages in Diary of a Prisoner concern Sarkozy’s evolving stance on France’s far-right. Once a fierce opponent of Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Sarkozy now describes Le Pen’s public support after his conviction as “brave and totally unambiguous.” He reveals that they spoke by phone and that he pledged not to participate in any future “Republican Front”—the traditional alliance of mainstream parties to block the far right from power. “Many voters [for the RN] today were supporters of me when I was politically active… Insulting the leaders of the RN is to insult their voters, that is to say people who are potentially our voters. I have a lot of differences with the leaders of the RN… But to exclude them from the Republican fold would be a mistake.”
He goes further, arguing that the National Rally is “not a danger for the Republic,” despite “problematic figures” and significant policy differences. “They represent so many French people, respect the results of the elections, and participate in the functioning of our democracy.” This shift has stunned many in the French political establishment. As France 24 notes, Sarkozy’s comments arrived like “a thunderclap” in the decades-long tradition of keeping the far right at bay. The mainstream right, led by his Republicans party, has stopped short of advocating formal alliances with the National Rally, but Sarkozy’s words are seen as opening the door to a new era of political realignment.
For Sarkozy, the prison experience was transformative—a break from the trappings of power and a reckoning with personal and political loss. “In La Santé I started my life anew,” he writes. As crowds lined up at a Paris bookshop for his signing event, it was clear that, love him or loathe him, Sarkozy’s story and his evolving views are still shaping the future of French politics.
