France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy will begin serving 5-year prison sentence Tuesday

Nicolas Sarkozy will become the first former French president in living memory to be imprisoned when he is expected to begin a five-year sentence Tuesday in Paris’ La Santé prison.

Convicted of criminal conspiracy in a scheme to finance his 2007 election campaign with funds from Libya, Sarkozy maintains his innocence. Regardless, he will be admitted to serve his time in a prison that has held some of the most high-profile inmates since the 19th century.

They include Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of treason because he was Jewish, and the Venezuelan militant known as Carlos the Jackal, who carried out several attacks on French soil.

Sarkozy told Le Figaro newspaper that he expects to be held in solitary confinement, where he would be kept away from all other prisoners for security reasons. Another possibility is that he is held in the prison’s section for “vulnerable″ inmates, colloquially known as the VIP section.

Former La Santé inmates described their experiences and what the former president might expect to face. The prison, which was inaugurated in 1867, has been fully renovated in recent years.

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“It’s not Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the Republic, that’s coming … It’s a man and he will live exactly the same thing that everyone’’ does, Pierre Botton, a former businessman-turned-author who was imprisoned in La Santé’s vulnerable section between 2020 and 2022 for misappropriation of funds from a charitable organization, told The Associated Press.

In an unprecedented judgment, the Paris judge ruled that Sarkozy would start to serve prison time without waiting for his appeal to be heard, due to “the seriousness of the disruption to public order caused by the offence.”

The former president has denied any wrongdoing and protested the decision that he should be imprisoned pending appeal.

“I’m not afraid of prison. I’ll hold my head high, including in front of the doors of La Santé,” Sarkozy told La Tribune Dimanche newspaper. “I’ll fight till the end.”

La Tribune Dimanche reports Sarkozy has his prison bag ready with clothes and 10 family photos he is allowed to bring.

Sarkozy also told Le Figaro newspaper he would bring three books — the maximum allowed — including “The Count of Monte Cristo” in two volumes and a biography of Jesus Christ. The hero of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” by French author Alexandre Dumas, escapes from an island prison where he spent 14 years before seeking revenge.