‘The noise is alas constant. But, just like the desert, inner life is fortified in prison.’ So writes former President of the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy in Journal d’un prisonnier (A prisoner’s diary), his account of the 27 days he spent as an inmate at Prison de la Santé in Paris. Sarkozy was sentenced after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy to obtain campaign funds from the Libyan regime for his 2007 presidential race. He has appealed against his conviction and will be tried again in the spring of 2026.

Upon publication in December 2025, Journal d’un prisonnier sold close to 100,000 copies in less than a week. This performance may be an expression of the public’s curiosity and compassion – or indeed Schadenfreude. Sarkozy may only have served 27 days of his original five-year sentence, but he is the first President in the history of the French Republic to have gone to gaol. It is also in keeping with the fact that political books generally do well in France. But what genre does this book belong to? Although it does mention the Republic’s political landscape and the desirability of a right-wing coalition with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National at the next election, Journal d’un prisonnier is primarily focused on its author’s experience. It is a plea for the disgraced Sarkozy’s innocence, and a therapeutic memoir of his traumatic experience in gaol.

As the title suggests, Journal d’un prisonnier aims to provide an account with universal resonance. Sarkozy describes the physical reality of his incarceration in solitary confinement (where he was held for his own safety) in an 11-square-metre cell. Alarming sounds are heard outside the door, time slows down, inactivity breeds physical discomfort, and the question of food being safe from interference is a concern (Sarkozy ate only yoghurts and cereal bars in order to guard against this). There are conversations with the prison chaplain. And every day, the act of writing his 200-page manuscript, on a plywood table, with a Bic pen.

Sarkozy also writes about being ‘persecuted’, describing his sentencing as ‘ubuesque’ – in reference to Alfred Jarry’s satire of power, the 1896 play Ubu roi. He uses an abundance of mystical and religious language. On the first day of his incarceration, he describes kneeling down to pray ‘for the strength to carry the cross of this injustice.’ There are references to other examples of prison writing: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead and Solzhenitsyn’s account of the gulag. Most controversially perhaps, Sarkozy has compared his own plight with that of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer who, in 1894, was wrongly convicted of being a German spy due to antisemitism and spent four years on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, before being cleared of any wrongdoing. Sarkozy had also let it be known that while in prison he would be reading, along with a biography of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils, Alexandre Dumas’s novel Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-45), whose hero, Edmond Dantès, the victim of a conspiracy, spends 14 years imprisoned, before escaping and carrying out his revenge.

Given these explicit points of reference, it is worth noting that with his book Sarkozy aims to join a long French tradition, that of the prison memoir and its critical stance against iniquity.

In Mémoires sur la Bastille, published in London in 1783, the political journalist Simon-Nicolas-Henry Linguet wrote: ‘la Bastille, comme la mort, égalise tous ceux qu’elle engloutit.’ (‘The Bastille, like death, equalises all those she swallows up.’) Reflecting on his incarceration in the fortress in 1780-82, Linguet protested the barbarous arbitrariness of the lettres de cachet – orders from the king, bearing his seal, against which no appeal was possible – that had led to it. Before Linguet, accounts by French Protestants who had been imprisoned, such as Constantin de Renneville’s L’Inquisition Françoise ou l’histoire de la Bastille (‘The French Inquisition or the History of the Bastille’), published in Amsterdam in 1715 and 1719 and widely distributed in France, focused on religious persecution. For religious dissidents, incarceration could also become a mystical experience, the enclosed space of the gaol encouraging, like a monk’s cell, metaphysical and religious contemplation. It was while being held in the Bastille in 1666-68 that the Jansenist theologian Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy completed his translation of the New Testament.

With revolutionary feeling coursing throughout 18^th century France, there was a vogue for memoirs written by prison escapees, most famously perhaps the best-selling Mémoires Authentiques de Latude, whose author, Jean Henri Latude, gave a colourful and dramatic account of the 35 years he spent in gaol, at Vincennes and in the Bastille, at the behest of Madame de Pompadour. When denied paper and ink in his cell, Latude apparently wrote on flattened pieces of bread, with a fishbone dipped in his own blood. He escaped a few times, most notably in 1756 from the Bastille, climbing through a chimney well on a rope ladder he had contrived to make from torn pieces of linen and strips of firewood.

Another idea developed in the run-up to the French Revolution: that of prison as a crucible for a writer’s voice. The Marquis de Sade began work on The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in Vincennes in 1782, eventually completing it in tiny writing that covered both sides of a 12-metre-long roll of paper in 1784, after being transferred to the Bastille. In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, into prison walked a man, and a writer came out of it. Prison also acted as a literary incubator for the novelist and playwright Jean Genet, who, while being held at Fresnes, wrote Le Miracle de la rose (1946), a crystallisation of his personal myth of violent criminal eroticism, laced with a deep fascination for Nazism, and inspired by his memories of the penal colony of Mettray.

In 1970s France, the gangster, bank robber and prison escape artist Jacques Mesrine increased his own notoriety through literary self-promotion, casting himself as an unrepentantly violent embodiment of anti-establishment ‘justice’. In 1977, he published his lurid autobiography, L’Instinct de mort (The Death Instinct), written when he was being held in the prisons of La Santé and Fleury-Mérogis, and followed it in 1979 with Coupable d’être innocent (Guilty of Innocence). Part of the public’s fascination with Mesrine as a sort of Freudian id of society is associated with his repeated escapes from gaol, including from La Santé in 1978, a feat that was deemed impossible at the time.

Escape from prison also provided French cinema with the central theme of two 20^th century classics: Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped, 1956) and Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (The Hole, 1959). Beyond their stylistic differences, both films strive with quasi-documentary precision to evoke the crushing monotony of prison life and to represent, through the efforts of its protagonists, the beauty of the tenacious human labour required to fashion the tools of escape. Becker’s more realistic storytelling focuses on concerted human action and solidarity, though the ending is pessimistic. In Bresson’s universe, informed by a Catholic hinterland, the lone protagonist, a member of the French Resistance who describes his experience in introspective voiceover, finds a way out of gaol both literally and, one senses, spiritually.

Whether Nicolas Sarkozy has found spiritual regeneration through the ordeal of prison remains to be decided, but his book’s success confirms that the French tradition of the prison memoir is alive and well.