“In prison, there is nothing to see, and nothing to do.” So said Nicolas Sarkozy, one-time president of France. You’d imagine, based on that sentence, that he wouldn’t have enough material to write a book about his time in prison but you’d be very wrong. “Nicolas Sarkozy, The Journal of a Prisoner” is 216 pages long. As Sarkozy spent 20 days behind bars, that means each day gets a whopping 11 pages of, well, nothingness.
Sarko, 70, was imprisoned after being found guilty of allowing a “close collaborator” and “unofficial intermediaries” to try to obtain funding from Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya for his 2007 presidential run. That made him the first former French head of state to end up behind bars since Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain.
The ex-president didn’t have to mix with the general prison population, however. He was separated from the other inmates, and two bodyguards occupied a neighboring cell to ensure his safety. So it was less “prison sentence” and more “lads holiday but the weather’s bad so you can’t go outside.”
A teaser quote from the book claims that “silence … does not exist at La Santé” and that noise “is alas constant.” But fear not: Our hero refused to be defeated, writing that “like [in] the desert, inner life strengthens in prison.” Touching stuff from a man whose inner life likely consists of resenting taller men.
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