How Nicolas Sarkozy Survived Twenty Days Behind Bars

Sarkozy is assigned prisoner number 320535. “Four days earlier, I had been Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of the Republic, being received by President Emmanuel Macron himself at the Élysée Palace,” he writes. “Could one ever have imagined a more striking contrast? A more ludicrous situation?” (And you thought Jean Valjean was having an identity crisis.) Sarkozy tries valiantly not to indulge in self-pity—child cancer patients have it worse, he reflects—but it is nonetheless clear that Cell No. 11 is not to his liking. In addition to the shit desk and chair, the shower is “the most incommodious” he has ever encountered, the mattress the hardest he’s ever felt, and the mirror has been hung at half height, so that he’s forced “to bend over double to fix my hair or trim my beard.” He is isolated in his cell, for safety reasons, while two bodyguards keep vigil nearby.

A longtime jogger and teetotaller, Sarkozy relies on routine to maintain his physical and mental equilibrium. He refuses to eat prison food, subsisting on yogurt, cereal bars, mineral water, apple juice, and “a few sweet treats” that he’s allowed to keep in a mini fridge. (“Neither wishing nor knowing how to cook,” he ignores the presence of a hot plate, even though a former chief of staff has been kind enough to write down instructions for boiling an egg.) Still, he has an in-room television and is allowed daily use of a treadmill; the room is “clean and rather luminous.” If it weren’t for the bars and the peephole, he writes, he might have thought he was in a “low-rent hotel.”

It’s time, really, that weighs on the prisoner’s spirit. “I feared my first Sunday,” he writes. The sands running through his hourglass are missed moments with his wife, the model and singer Carla Bruni, and his four children. His third grandchild is born while he’s locked up. In nearly eighteen years of marriage, Sarkozy writes, he and Bruni had never been apart for more than a few days, and their record remains unbroken during his incarceration. (Sarkozy claims that he insisted on being treated like any other inmate, but Mediapart, the enemy website, recently reported that the French Minister of Justice intervened to give Bruni special visiting privileges.) While Sarkozy is away, a huge, mysterious bouquet of flowers is delivered daily to the couple’s home. The card invariably reads “Edmond Dantès”—the name of the dashing, unjustly imprisoned hero of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” I really hoped that our narrator was about to out himself as the perpetrator of this extravagant, kind of freaky romantic gesture. Alas, the sender was one of his friends, hoping to boost morale.

Sarkozy claims that he’s a softie, “an incurable sentimental” with a forgiving streak, but his current circumstances have forced him to reëvaluate certain things. I’m not sure where he found time to read Alexandre Dumas’s masterpiece—along with the Jesus biography, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Letter to a Hostage,” and a bit of Sartre—while also writing a book in twenty days, but the experience seems to have had a bracing effect. Dumas’s book, Sarkozy explains, “delivers a dual message. Rebirth, of course, but also vengeance.” Edmond Dantès does not forget those who’ve crossed him but, rather, “finds each of his accusers and grants them the punishment they deserve.” (Here’s hoping that works out better for Sarkozy than it did for the Count.) Let this be a warning: if you are a French magistrate and receive an invitation to a dinner party featuring mysterious liquids and exotic fish, better to decline.

“Le Journal d’un Prisonnier” is currently the No. 1 best-seller on French Amazon, edging out the forty-first volume of a series of “Astérix” comics. Hundreds of adoring supporters turned out for a signing in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, Sarkozy’s Paris fief. On purely literary merits, though, the book is, at best, a mediocris opus. Much of it reads like a padded-out term paper, replete with extraneous detail and word-count-boosting reps. We learn not once but twice, for example, that the prison guards, “many of them originating from France’s overseas territories,” never fail to address him “using the title of President.”