The ex-president of France plans a book in the coming weeks titled A Prisoner’s Diary, detailing his time endured in custody.
This news emerged less than two weeks after the former president gained freedom as he contests the court ruling on charges of illegal collaboration connected to efforts to secure election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator.
“Inside jail there is nothing to see, and nothing to do,” he notes in one passage, suggesting the memoir is more about his reflections during seclusion as opposed to extensive analysis regarding the overcrowded and crisis-hit French prison system.
“I forget silence, which doesn’t exist in La Santé, where there is endless commotion,” he states. “The din persists relentlessly. Yet, similar to barren lands, one’s inner world is fortified in prison.”
While appealing for release, Sarkozy participated by video link from inside the facility, describing his time inside as exhausting. He expressed in court: “I wish to commend those working in the jail, who are exceptionally humane, and who helped make this ordeal manageable – as it truly is one.”
“I didn’t expect that at 70 years of age, I’d find myself behind bars. It’s a trial forced upon me. It’s challenging, I acknowledge, it’s very hard. It leaves a mark on any prisoner due to its intensity.”
He, who served as France’s president from 2007 to 2012, became the inaugural former head of an EU country and the first leader since WWII from France to serve time in prison.
Prior to imprisonment he mentioned he would use his time to write a book.
It remains unclear if he found the opportunity to read and critique the texts he had in his cell: a two-volume biography of Jesus and Alexandre Dumas’s novel the famous story, in which a wrongfully accused individual ends up incarcerated later flees to seek vengeance.
Sarkozy remained in solitary confinement to protect him in a space approximately nine square meters including private facilities in the Paris jail in Paris. Security personnel were stationed in an adjacent room.
Sources mentioned his diet consisted only yoghurts in prison because he feared meals provided might have been spat on. He had facilities to prepare his own meals but refused this, based on unnamed sources. Not known is if the memoir includes meals during incarceration.
The legal representative, Christophe Ingrain daily while he was in prison, informed the court his safety would improve out of prison compared to inside. “He has faced death threats, listened to yells during nighttime plus rapid actions in an adjacent room as a detainee harmed themselves.”
His incarceration began last month following a Paris court imposed a half-decade term for illegal collaboration over a scheme to acquire election financing for his 2007 presidential race.
He denies wrongdoing and is contesting the ruling, and another court case set for next spring.
