Prison Notebooks

A bestseller by the former French president and one of the most powerful men in the world, whose arrest caused an international sensation and rewrote history.

“In prison, there is nothing to see or do. But you can hear a lot, because silence does not exist in La Santé prison. The noise there, alas, is constant. In prison, as in the desert, one’s inner life grows stronger.”

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012) was sentenced to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy in the autumn of 2025. He allegedly indirectly approached individuals close to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and arranged with them to finance his presidential campaign, a claim he has always vehemently denied. For the first time in the history of the European Union, a head of a member state found himself behind bars. Despite appealing, he spent three weeks in prison, during which time he wrote.

In his notes, he describes the details of his stay in Paris’s La Santé prison, where General Alfred Dreyfus was once also held. He reflects on the trial that preceded his imprisonment, as well as on recent conversations with President Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, and other contemporary French political figures. He contemplates his political career, the current state of French politics, and the justice system, which, in his view, is judging him not “for what he did, but for who he is”.

The publication of this book became a major event in France. In the first month alone, 200,000 copies were sold.