Paris – Nicolas Sarkozy will become the first former French president in living memory to be imprisoned when he is expected to begin a five-year sentence on Tuesday in Paris' La Santé prison.

Convicted of criminal conspiracy in a scheme to finance his 2007 election campaign with funds from Libya, Sarkozy maintains his innocence. Regardless, he will be admitted to serve his time in a prison that has held some of the most high-profile inmates since the 19th century. They include Capt Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of treason because he was Jewish, and the Venezuelan militant known as Carlos the Jackal, who carried out several attacks on French soil.

Sarkozy told Le Figaro newspaper that he expects to be held in solitary confinement, where he would be kept away from all other prisoners for security reasons. Another possibility is that he is held in the prison's section for“vulnerable” inmates, colloquially known as the VIP section.

Former La Santé inmates described their experiences and what the former president might expect to face. The prison, which was inaugurated in 1867, has been fully renovated in recent years.

“It's not Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the Republic, that's coming... It's a man and he will live exactly the same thing that everyone does,” Pierre Botton, a former businessman-turned-author who was imprisoned in La Santé's vulnerable section between 2020 and 2022 for misappropriation of funds from a charitable organisation, told The Associated Press.

In an unprecedented judgment, the Paris judge ruled that Sarkozy would start to serve prison time without waiting for his appeal to be heard, due to“the seriousness of the disruption to public order caused by the offense.”

Sarkozy to hold his head high

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