PARIS (AP) — Once the most powerful person in France, Nicolas Sarkozy, is now behind bars.
Being locked up in Paris’ La Santé prison for criminal conspiracy is the latest twist in the uncommon life of the 70-year-old former president.
Proudly tough on crime when he was in government, Sarkozy now has to adjust to the strict constraints of hours and days governed by penitentiary rules. He is appealing his conviction and maintains his innocence.
In sentencing Sarkozy to five years in prison for plotting to finance his 2007 campaign with funds from Libya, judges took a swing at privilege and impunity in France and signaled that all people are equal before the law.
But the newest of more than 80,000 inmates in French prisons is the only one who used to command the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Sarkozy still has friends in high places. President Emmanuel Macron welcomed him back to the presidential Elysée Palace last week for a farewell meeting before Sarkozy became, on Tuesday, modern France’s first ex-leader to be incarcerated. A police motorcade escorted his car to prison.
Here are other things to know about France’s president from 2007 to 2012:
One-term president
Sarkozy’s election marked a generational change for France: Born in Paris in 1955, he was France’s first president with no memory of World War II.
A conservative, Sarkozy beat Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in the election’s second-round run-off, thwarting her bid to become France’s first woman president.
After a five-year term buffeted by the 2008 crisis in the U.S. financial system that rocked the global economy, Sarkozy’s reelection effort in 2012 ended in defeat to another Socialist leader — François Hollande, Royal’s ex-partner and father of their four children.
‘President Bling-Bling’
Blunt-speaking and purposefully provocative at times, Sarkozy was, and remains, a polarizing figure.
His admiration of money and glitz earned him the nickname “President Bling-Bling,” not a positive thing in a country with a complicated, even hostile, relationship with wealth that guillotined aristocrats during the French Revolution.
Sarkozy ostentatiously celebrated his 2007 win with rich friends at the chic Brasserie Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées and jetted off to holiday aboard a billionaire industrialist’s yacht.
One of his government’s first acts was to more than double his salary as president. Sarkozy once suggested that a person who doesn’t have a Rolex watch by age 50 is a failure.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy
Sarkozy was still married to his second wife, Cécilia, when he entered the Elysée Palace.
But within a year, they divorced — a first for a French president — and weeks later, he appeared at Disneyland with supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni, now Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Their romance and lifestyle made them tabloid fare. But their relationship has endured his legal troubles.
They’re both skilled in using the spotlight.
He embraced her before getting into the car for his ride to prison. She then slowly walked back to their house without him, an image that feeds their narrative of a family laboring against injustice.
An outsider
The son of a Hungarian immigrant father and French-Greek mother, Sarkozy described himself as an “outsider” and self-styled “man of the people.”
A lawyer by training, it was in politics that he quickly shone. He became a mayor at age 28. He made national headlines in 1993 when he helped negotiate the release of children held by a hostage-taker strapped with explosives, who called himself “Human Bomb.”
Unafraid to break French taboos, Sarkozy breathed some real-world modernity into the tradition-bound presidency, going jogging and biking in public.
Dubbed “Sarko the American,” he tightened ties with the U.S. and Israel.
He also championed Western military intervention to oust Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi. Their relationship later became the focus of police investigations in France and the trial this year over the financing of Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.
‘Poor jerk!’
First as a minister and later as president, Sarkozy sometimes shocked and angered with crude and direct language. His energy was sometimes seen as impetuousness. French media dubbed him the “hyper-president.”
He once told a man at an agricultural fair who refused to shake his hand: “Get lost, you poor jerk!”
On his path to the presidency, as an ambitious interior minister in charge of fighting crime, he infuriated blue-collar towns by describing some of their residents as “scum” and suggesting that high-pressure hoses should be used to clean them up.
He pushed for tighter controls on immigration, warning of France being potentially overwhelmed by migration, especially from Africa. Under Sarkozy, France banned the wearing of face-covering Islamic veils, known as burqas, in public places.
In the wake of his presidency, far-right leader Marine Le Pen has relentlessly focused on immigration and the place of France’s 5 million Muslims with growing success, edging closer to power.
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Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet contributed to this report.
