Sarkozy writes about his time in prison: "Welcome to hell!"

ParisA month after being released from Santé prison, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has published a book in France to explain his prison experience. The journal of a prisoner [The Diary of a Prisoner]. It's a 200-page book in which Sarkozy settles scores with French political leaders and talks about his time in prison. which only lasted 19 days and was full of privileges"I had climbed, one by one, the rungs of social life throughout my existence. I had just fallen ten floors in one fell swoop," he writes of his admission to Santé, the prison located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

"I never would have imagined myself passing through the walls of a prison. It wasn't even imaginable," the conservative confesses. On the day of his admission to the Santé, He writes, "I had to acknowledge that the unthinkable had happened." Sarkozy asks himself, "What crimes could I have committed?" and attributes the situation to having been President of the Republic, "a grave offense in the eyes of all those who hate political power, especially if it is right-wing."

The former resident of the Élysée Palace conveniently ignores the fact that he has been convicted by the French courts in three cases related to corruption and illegal campaign financing. Of the three, the illegal wiretapping case and the illegal financing of the 2012 presidential campaign are already final convictions, while the case related to the illegal financing of the 2007 campaign by the Libyan regime—which led to his 19 days in prison—is pending appeal. The trial will begin in February. Despite the convictions, Sarkozy proclaims his innocence and speaks of a "conspiracy" to justify the conviction for the Libyan financing, shamelessly referring to it as a "judicial scandal."

Privileges

During his time in prison, as prisoner number 320535, Sarkozy maintains that he received—and requested—no privileges whatsoever. However, his account suggests that he did receive privileges: from being personally received by the director of Santé prison to being assigned a single cell for people with disabilities—larger than the others—in an overcrowded prison, and having absolutely no contact with other prisoners. He also received privileges in other details, such as the fact that officers knocked on his door before entering his cell and addressed him as "President," or the controversial government decision to permanently station two police officers next to his cell for his security. In the book, the former president laments the harshness of the prison conditions: a cell—with a refrigerator and television—that he considers small, two windows through which he could not see the sky, and a very uncomfortable mattress. "I had never seen such a hard mattress, not even in the army during my military service. A table would have been almost softer," he asserts. However, Sarkozy confesses that the cell was "clean and bright enough, it could have been in a cheap hotel."

The former president also complains about the noise in the prison, especially when he opened his window and heard the other inmates shouting. "Some of my neighbors seemed to be mentally unstable. One of them kept banging on the bars with a metal object," Sarkozy states. In his opinion, isolated from the other prisoners and surrounded by police, the atmosphere was "threatening." The noise continued at night. The former president claims that his cellmate spent part of his first night singing a song byThe Lion King and banging on the bars with a spoon. "Welcome to hell!" he writes.