Paris
—
As a former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy has closed many doors to ordinary French citizens.
On October 21, he finds himself in a room no one wants to be in, as the cold steel of his cell door clangs behind him.
The former French leader was found guilty in September of criminal conspiracy after a court heard he planned to finance his 2007 presidential campaign with money from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favors. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but there is a high possibility that he will be released on parole.
The former president plans to appeal, but in the meantime he is expected to be in solitary confinement or in a cell in the so-called “VIP wing” of La Santé prison complex, the only prison in the French capital.
This wing is usually reserved for prisoners deemed unfit to be part of the prison’s general population due to safety concerns. They could be politicians, former police officers, members of far-right organizations or people with ties to Islamist terrorist organizations, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported.
Sitting opposite a nursing home in a residential corner of Paris’s 14th arrondissement, La Santé’s modest presence is only revealed by the occasional siren as prisoners are transported to the scene.
During the winter months, prisoners’ faces can sometimes be seen peeking out from behind the prison’s barred windows and through the bare branches of the tree-lined streets. Sometimes, their gaze is returned by packages thrown over the wall by passersby, as witnessed by CNN.
Over the past century and a half, the walls of La Santé have robbed many famous French men of their freedom.
One of the world’s most wanted terrorists in the 1970s and 1980s, Ilic Ramírez Sánchez, also known as “Carlos the Jackal,” spent time in La Santé, as did Jacques Mesurine, a notorious 1970s murderer and bank robber. Jacques Mesurine’s criminal career was portrayed in a 2008 film starring Vincent Cassel. Mesrine also famously jumped out of the walls of La Santé.
Other high-profile prisoners include Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military captain at the center of the late 19th century Dreyfus Affair, who was wrongly convicted of treason due to anti-Semitism, and, more recently, Emmanuel Macron’s close aide and former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla, who was filmed punching a yellow vest protester and sentenced to prison.
Mr. Sarkozy won’t even become the first world leader behind bars. Panama’s former dictator Manuel Noriega spent time in Panama after being extradited by the United States after being ousted by the American invasion.
Understandably, Mr. Sarkozy is not happy about going to prison.
“If you want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison. But hold my breath. I am innocent,” he said after the sentencing hearing, his voice boiling with anger.
“This cheating is a scandal,” he said, with his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy by his side.
If she visits him, she will likely be one of the first former supermodels to go to prison.
But behind its high brick walls, La Santé is no dungeon.
“It’s okay, La Santé, this is like an Ibis hotel,” Marco Mouly, a former inmate of the prison’s VIP wing, told BFMTV in a 2022 documentary, referring to Europe’s popular budget hotel chain.
Built in 1867, the prison recently reopened in 2019 after undergoing a four-year renovation and modernization program, with a distinctive radial layout designed to give inmates a sense of constant surveillance.
If Mr. Sarkozy is housed in the VIP wing, he will be assigned one of 18 identical cells, each equipped with a cooking stove, refrigerator, television, shower, toilet, and a landline telephone line that prisoners can use to call certain authorized numbers.
The cells are 9 square meters (approximately 97 square feet), which is no larger than a regular cell, but residents of this special wing usually do not have to share cells for safety reasons.
Still, experiencers say the stay is far from comfortable.
“The problem is the noise,” Didier Schuller, a former civil servant and politician who was detained for several weeks in La Santé, told BFMTV in 2022. “I wake up at night hearing people screaming.”
A former police officer interviewed by a broadcaster said he was constantly yelled at by prisoners from other wings who found out he had arrived as a prisoner.
It is highly unlikely that Mr. Sarkozy will not attract similar attention behind bars. And despite vowing to appeal the conviction, his freedom may still seem a long way off on his first night locked up.
“I know when he’s going to go in,” Patrick Barcagni, a former mayor of Levallois-Perret, northwest of Paris, told BFMTV of La Santé, who served several months in prison for tax evasion before being released on health grounds. “You never know when it’s going to come out.”
