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Nicolas Sarkozy began a five-year sentence for a criminal conspiracy in a campaign financing scandal on Tuesday, while preparing his appeal from behind bars.
Sarkozy, 70, is the first former French president to serve time in prison, in a case that has sparked shockwaves in France.
The ruling marks a dramatic fall from grace for the former leader, but has also proved divisive owing to judges’ decision to jail him before all appeals had been exhausted.
Lawyers for Sarkozy said they would now start proceedings to request his provisional release, which could take up to two months to examine.
The case centres on accusations Sarkozy and two aides took millions from late Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi to fund his 2007 presidential campaign. Judges cleared the rightwing politician of several more serious charges of embezzlement and illegal campaign financing.
“It’s not a former president of the republic who is being jailed this morning, it’s an innocent man,” Sarkozy said in a statement on X while a convoy of cars sped him to Paris’s historic La Santé Prison.
A few dozen people clapped in support as he left his home with his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
The former president will be isolated from other inmates for his own security, his lawyer Christophe Ingrain told BFM TV. La Santé is known for housing late Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Société Générale rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel and even, for a brief stint, poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
The case has cast a spotlight on Sarkozy’s outsize influence on French politics even after his presidency ended in 2012. Current justice minister Gérald Darmanin, who had previously worked for Sarkozy, said this week he was “saddened” by his plight “on a human level”.
President Emmanuel Macron met Sarkozy last week before his incarceration, the Élysée Palace said, without saying what was discussed.
“I’ve been very clear in public about the independence of judicial authorities . . . but it was normal that on a human level I should receive one of my predecessors in this context,” Macron told reporters on Monday in Slovenia.
Sarkozy called the verdict a “violation of the rule of law” in a series of newspaper interviews before his incarceration.
His lawyers have already launched an appeal against the verdict.
After the ruling was read out in September, a livid Sarkozy decried it as “scandalous” and said he was the victim of a hate campaign. The verdict includes a €100,000 fine.
Sarkozy has underscored that judges had not been able to prove any personal enrichment in the case, and said the conspiracy charge was tenuous, based on the allegation that he had allowed aides to envisage a possible Libyan financing.
But Sarkozy’s outcry over the terms of his conviction has caused a stir in itself and alarmed some constitutionalists. The judge who pronounced the verdict received death threats in late September, prompting concerns from magistrates’ unions.
“The rule of law is the foundation of our democracy,” Macron said on X at the time, calling the threats unacceptable.
On Tuesday, Rémy Heitz, a prosecutor with the court of appeal, told France Info radio that Darmanin’s promise to visit Sarkozy in prison as justice minister to check on his safety could be problematic, and could “affect magistrates’ independence”.
Other politicians have also seized on the case, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen. She is under an immediate five-year ban on running for office, pending her appeal, after her conviction earlier this year for embezzling EU funds. She called the “generalisation” of moves to immediately apply sanctions, like in Sarkozy’s case, a “great danger”.
Sarkozy has been convicted for other offences, including in a separate illegal financing case, and been subject to travel restrictions and made to wear an electronic bracelet as a result.
The former president has told friends “the end of the story has not been written” in the Libyan affair, including at a goodbye event in Paris in early October, his former communications adviser Franck Louvrier said. Some 150 former work colleagues, relatives and even current culture minister Rachida Dati attended.
Sarkozy told French media he was taking a biography of Jesus and Alexandre Dumas’ tale of an imprisoned hero, the Count of Monte Christo, to read.
Sarkozy was ‘‘very resilient and combative,’’ Louvrier said. ‘‘He’s in campaign mode to show his innocence”.
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