A minimally cold and detailed analysis of Nicolas Sarkozy's highly publicized arrest in Paris's La Santé prison exposes the former French president's strategy, making him look ridiculous. Early Tuesday morning, the former president of the Élysée Palace for five years—from 2007 to 2012—emerged from a corner of the expensive 16th floor. rounding from the French capital to head towards the penalty spot. The scene was tragic. He and his wife, retired model Carla Bruni, walked down this narrow street, hand in hand and completely alone, towards the corner, where there is a small square. There, the car that was supposed to take him to prison was waiting for them, and it was surrounded by press and supporters. In fact, more press than supporters.

The former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy has already spent the first 24 hours closed. Sentenced to five years in prison for criminal association For having received money from Moammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime in the 2007 election campaign financing case, Sarkozy entered the Santé prison, a penitentiary located in Paris's 14th arrondissement, on Tuesday. Like all French prisons, it is overcrowded: its occupancy rate is 191%. There are almost twice as many inmates as the 757 spaces provided.

From their complex/pride as a great young nation, Americans have always felt fascination, and also a certain anguish, for the relationship that the French have with their history and culture. You could literally say that they adore them, and a good part of the myth of the magnitude And the rhetoric of French nationalism (as cloying as that of any other European nationalism, but more powerful, with permission from Germany) is based precisely on the cultural milestones of the country's history. This impresses Americans: in the film The train (1964), Burt Lancaster played a hero of the French resistance fighting against the Nazi plundering of works of art, towards the end of the occupation. A curator at the Jeu de Paume implored him to stop a train loaded with paintings by great artists with impassioned arguments: "They've taken our country and our food, they're living in our homes, now they want to take our art. These paintings are France." The discussion about what is more valuable, the work of art or human life, hangs over the entire film. Moreover, the French are also attracted to Americans, and this has also been reflected in cinema: the New Wave largely consists of a reinterpretation of the codes established by classic Hollywood genre films, especially film noir. It should not be forgotten that the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the United States to celebrate the centennial of its declaration of independence. They saw in the young country on the other side of the Atlantic that had emancipated itself with a humanist Constitution a new incarnation of the ideals of the Republic: liberty, equality, fraternity.