France puts a former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, behind bars

Mr Sarkozy, accompanied to the court ruling by Carla Bruni, his wife, and his adult children, has denied any wrongdoing and repeatedly said that he is innocent.

Apart from the wartime collaborationist leader, Marshal Pétain, the last French head of state to be sent to prison after leaving office was Louis XVI in 1792. Following the abolition of the monarchy, the king of France was incarcerated, along with his family, in the Prison du Temple in Paris. On the morning of October 21st, for the first time in modern France, a former president—Nicolas Sarkozy—will also be put behind bars. He was found guilty last month in relation to illegal campaign-financing, and given a five-year prison term. Mr Sarkozy will be driven to the Prison de la Santé, in the southern reaches of the French capital.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.(Reuters)

A judge in the Paris criminal court on September 25th found Mr Sarkozy guilty of “criminal conspiracy” in a trial over the illicit financing of his 2007 presidential campaign by Muammar Qaddafi, the former Libyan dictator. The former president, said the judge, had “allowed his close aides” to solicit funds, although he could not “establish proof” that money was ultimately used to finance the campaign. Mr Sarkozy was acquitted of three other, more serious, charges, including corruption and embezzlement. The judge sentenced him to prison with almost immediate effect, meaning that the former president will be serving time even while he appeals.

Mr Sarkozy, who was accompanied to the court ruling by Carla Bruni, his wife, and his adult children, has denied any wrongdoing and repeatedly said that he is innocent. Two days before heading to prison, the 70-year-old former president told La Tribune Dimanche, a newspaper: “I am not afraid of prison. I will hold my head high, including in front of the gates.” For his safety, Mr Sarkozy is expected to be held in a solitary unit, in a cell measuring about ten square metres. Once he is behind bars Mr Sarkozy’s lawyers are expected to lodge a request with the appeals court for conditional release.

The fact that a former president, in office from 2007 to 2012, will serve time at all, let alone while still on appeal, has shaken France—and divided it. Manuel Bompard, from the hard-left Unsubmissive France, said approvingly that the verdict showed that the rule of law applied to “the powerful” as well as the people. Marine Le Pen, the hard-right leader who was herself banned earlier this year from running for elected office in a case over the misuse of European Parliament funds, called the sentencing with immediate effect a “great danger”. (As it happens, Ms Le Pen’s ban was also applied with immediate effect while she appeals.)

Even Gérard Larcher, the centre-right president of the Senate, said he “shared” the growing public concern over the immediate application of a sentence before a legal appeal. A heated public debate has broken out over whether the judiciary in France has become politicised; the presiding judge in the case has received death threats. President Emmanuel Macron urged people to respect Mr Sarkozy’s right of appeal, as well as the impartiality of the judges.

It is quite a turnaround from the days when French politicians were seen as the beneficiaries of a culture of impunity. In the past criminal cases against politicians often failed to reach court, or were dropped because of the statute-of-limitations rule. Despite years of trying to prosecute Jacques Chirac, a former president who died in 2019, for his time as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995, investigating judges managed to take only one case against him to court. That trial in some ways marked a new era. Chirac became the first former president under the Fifth Republic to be tried in court, in a case over “fake jobs” at the Paris town hall. In 2011 he was found guilty and given a suspended sentence.

Since then a steady procession of politicians has filed in and out of the courtroom. In 2019 Jérôme Cahuzac, a former Socialist minister, was allowed to wear an electronic tag instead of serving time in prison for fiscal fraud. A year later a court sentenced François Fillon, a former centre-right prime minister under Mr Sarkozy, to five years in prison for embezzlement; the sentence was reduced on appeal to four years, suspended. Mr Sarkozy himself has this year worn an electronic tag for a conviction for corruption and influence-peddling in a separate case. A number of politicians (Patrick Balkany, Georges Tron, Claude Guéant) have also served time behind bars.

By the standards of other Western democracies, Mr Sarkozy’s incarceration stands out for the severity of the ruling in his case; collaborators apart, no western European president or prime minister has ever been to jail in post-war times. But it also fits a pattern under which politicians in France are increasingly being held to account by the judiciary. The country, it seems, no longer tolerates the practices to which it once turned a blind eye.