PARIS (AP) — Once the most powerful man in France, Nicolas Sarkozy is now behind bars.
Incarceration in Paris's La Santé prison on conspiracy charges is the latest twist in the extraordinary life of the 70-year-old former president.
Having been proudly tough on crime in government, Sarkozy is now forced to adapt to the strict limits of hours and days set by prison rules. He is appealing the verdict and maintains his innocence.
By sentencing Sarkozy to five years in prison for plotting to finance his 2007 election campaign with funds from Libya, the judges took advantage of privilege and impunity in France and sent a message that all people are equal before the law.
But the newest of the more than 80,000 inmates in French prisons is the only one who previously commanded the country's nuclear arsenal.
Sarkozy still has friends in high places. President Emmanuel Macron welcomed him back to the presidential Elysee Palace last week for a farewell meeting before Sarkozy on Tuesday became the first former leader of modern France to be jailed. A police motorcade escorted his car to prison.
Here's what else you need to know about the French president from 2007 to 2012:
President for one term
Sarkozy's election marked a generational change in France: he was born in Paris in 1955 and became the first French president with no memory of World War II.
Conservative Sarkozy defeated Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in a runoff election, thwarting her bid to become France's first female president.
After a five-year term stricken by the 2008 US financial crisis that rocked the global economy, Sarkozy's bid for re-election in 2012 ended with the defeat of another Socialist leader, Francois Hollande, Royal's former partner and father of their four children.
“President Bling-Bling”
Crude and at times purposefully provocative, Sarkozy was and remains a polarizing figure.
His admiration for money and glitter earned him the nickname “President Bling Bling,” which is not a positive development in a country with a complex, even hostile relationship with wealth that guillotined aristocrats during the French Revolution.
Sarkozy ostentatiously celebrated his 2007 victory with wealthy friends at the posh Brasserie Fouquet's restaurant on the Champs-Elysees and went on holiday aboard the billionaire industrialist's yacht.
One of the first acts of his government was to more than double his salary as president. Sarkozy once suggested that a person who does not have a Rolex watch by the age of 50 is a failure.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy
Sarkozy was still married to his second wife Cecilia when he entered the Elysee Palace.
But they divorced a year later – a first for the French president – and a few weeks later he appeared at Disneyland with supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni, now Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Their romance and lifestyle made them tabloids. But their relationship survived his troubles with the law.
They both know how to use a spotlight.
He hugged her before getting into his car and driving to the prison. She then slowly returned to their home without him, an image that fuels their narrative of a family fighting injustice.
Outsider
The son of a Hungarian immigrant and a French-Greek mother, Sarkozy described himself as an “outsider” and a self-proclaimed “man of the people.”
A lawyer by training, it was in politics that he quickly shone. He became mayor at age 28. He made national headlines in 1993 when he helped negotiate the release of children held by a hostage-taker who called himself “The Human Bomb” bound by explosives.
Unafraid to break French taboos, Sarkozy injected some real modernity into his traditional presidency by jogging and cycling in public.
Dubbed “American Sarco,” he strengthened ties with the United States and Israel.
He also advocated Western military intervention to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Their relationship later became the subject of a police investigation in France and a trial this year over the financing of Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.
– Poor idiot!
First as a minister and then as president, Sarkozy sometimes shocked and outraged with crude and direct language. His energy was sometimes perceived as impetuousness. The French media dubbed him the “hyper-president”.
One day at an agricultural fair he told a man who refused to shake his hand, “Get lost, you poor fellow!”
On his way to the presidency, as an ambitious home secretary in charge of fighting crime, he enraged working-class towns by calling some of their residents “scum” and proposing the use of high-pressure hoses to clean them up.
He pushed for tighter controls on immigration, warning that France could potentially be overwhelmed by migration, especially from Africa. Under Sarkozy, France banned the wearing of the Islamic face-covering veil, known as the burqa, in public.
Since 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 as he moves closer to power.
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Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet contributed to this report.
