Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who on Tuesday began serving a five-year prison term for criminal conspiracy to gain illegal funding for his 2007 election campaign from the then regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is receiving unprecedented 24-hour protection by two armed police officers occupying a neighbouring cell at La Santé prison in Paris.
The presence of the officers from the SDLP protection service, which is a dedicated police corps providing security to past and present high-ranking French figures, visiting foreign dignitaries and French diplomats abroad, will last as long as Sarkozy, 70, remains in prison.
Regarding his imprisonment, Sarkozy announced beforehand, in interviews with the weeklies Le Journal du Dimanche and La Tribune Dimanche, and the daily Le Figaro, that he sought “no privilege”, “no benefit” and “no favour”. Among the favours and priviliges he has in fact received was a tête-à-tête meeting with President Emmanuel Macron shortly before his incarceration, which further fuelled criticism over the preferential treatment meted out to him, and which includes the delay of several weeks between his conviction and sentencing, in September, and imprisonment.
The former president, the first French head of state to be imprisoned (with the exception of the leader of the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain), has compared himself to Edmond Dantès, the fictional, wrongly imprisoned hero of the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Christo, and also Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer who, at the end of the 19th century, was the target of an anti-Semitic conspiracy, wrongly accused of spying for Germany and sent to the penal colony Devil’s Island.
Shortly before Sarkozy was jailed on Tuesday morning, the head of the French prison service, Sébastien Cauwel, detailed the security measures already in place surrounding the former president’s stay at La Santé, when no special police presence was mentioned. Cauwel announced Sarkozy would be placed in a cell within La Santé prison’s maximum security wing in order to ensure “Mr Sarkozy’s security and order within the establishment”, telling RTL radio that, “the objective is that he never bumps into other inmates, neither in his cell nor the activity areas, nor in the exercise yard or during [prison] visits”.
The Santé prison’s maximum security wing contains just 15 cells, distanced from the nearly 700 other cells within the jail (where many prisoners are kept three to a cell, amid overcrowding that now reaches 163%). The wing is mostly occupied by major figures of organised crime, terrorists, and police officers accused of criminal activity. The former president’s cell measures nine square metres, containing a shower and toilet, basic kitchen facilities, a television and a landline phone.
The exceptional protection measure for Sarkozy, on top of the conditions outlined by Cauwel, caused anger among prison staff unions. The UFAP-UNSA union issued a statement on Thursday calling it “crazy, a lunacy of a security measure and above all an unprecedented humiliation for all the penitentiary staff”.
“To introduce weapons into [a place of] detention, even under the pretext of protection, is to cross a red line, it is to spit in the faces of thousands of prison staff who, every day, ensure safety and discipline, and who guarantee the dignity of our establishments,” wrote the union’s secretary general Alexandre Caby.
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On Wednesday, the head of La Santé prison’s branch of the FO trades union, Hugo Vitry, also expressed irritation at the measure. “We were totally unaware [of the move] and are waiting for explanations,” he said, adding that nothing similar was put in place during the high-profile detentions of Sarkozy’s former interior minister and chief of staff Claude Guéant, nor that of Sarkozy ally and former mayor of the Levallois-Perret Paris suburb, Patrick Balkany, both released in 2022. Both, underlined Vitry, were held in a lower security wing for “vulnerable” inmates, “and for whom all passed without incident”.
French interior minister Laurent Nuñez said the close-quarter police protection of Sarkozy was a continuation of the protection he has been afforded, as for all presidents, since leaving office in 2012. It was justified in prison, said Nuñez, both because of his “status” and “the threats” made against him. According to one of Sarkozy’s lawyers, Jean-Michel Darrois, the prisons administration and the justice ministry decided the permanent presence of the two police protection officers was justified by their estimation of the risk against Sarkozy from within the prison.
Meanwhile, three of the prison’s inmates were placed in police custody on Wednesday, suspected of making a video posted on social media in which death threats were made against Sarkozy, according to the Paris prosecution services.
Justice minister Gérald Darmanin, a close political ally of Sarkozy, his political mentor, announced earlier this month that he planned to regularly visit the former president in prison, an unprecedented move which a senior French public prosecutor has described as “harming the independence of magistrates”.
France’s magistrature has become a target of fierce criticism from Sarkozy’s conservative camp and supporters, and his broad entourage, who allege that he is the victim of a witch hunt by leftwing magistrates – and some media, including Mediapart. One of his wide circle, French football businessman Jean-Claude Darmon, speaking to Europe 1 radio on Tuesday, summed up how others like him felt over Sarkozy’s imprisonment. “It’s a shock for people like us,” he said, “we’re not made for prison, we’re not animals, it’s terrible.”
Speaking on TV Channel CNews on Wednesday, Darmanin said the video of threats posted on social media “show that a danger exists […] and that particular attention must be paid to his [Sarkozy’s] conditions in detention”.
“I don’t do prison tourism, but in a short while I will go to see president Sarkozy, and I enquire about his detention conditions every day,” Darmanin added.
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The original French report on which this article is based can be found here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse