When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy gets bored, when he lives moments of calm, he tends to feel impatient, to get nervous, to act on impulse.
And that's when he takes a wrong step.
"I am anguished," he confessed last December in one of the last trial hearings for having tried to elicit information from a prosecutor in a case that affected and worried him, in exchange for promising the prosecutor help to obtain a position in Monaco.
On Monday the court issued a sentence: three years in prison for the former president of the Republic, of which he must serve one and may do so with an electronic bracelet.
When the sentence is appealed, the sentence has been suspended until the new trial.
Those who know him say - and he says so himself - that it is in the most difficult moments when Sarkozy is truly Sarkozy, when he brings out the best of himself.
And the current one is one of them.
The condemnation is not Sarkozy's political death, although it ruins the hopes that Sarkozy and some supporters still harbored about a possible return to power.
"It is the end of any hypothesis of a candidacy in the presidential elections of 2022", says the essayist Alain Minc, a friend of his.
But it is not the end of his political influence.
If Sarkozy said: 'In the name of the national interest, I support President Emmanuel Macron in 2022', this would be very valuable.
It would guarantee Macron votes from the right. "
"The storms have always fascinated me", starts the last book of the former head of state,
Le temps des tempêtes
(The time of storms).
Historian Éric Roussel, biographer of presidents and author of an essay titled
Nicolas Sarkozy.
De près, de loin
(Nicolas Sarkozy. Up close, from afar) for whom he interviewed him extensively, corroborates: “What unleashes his energy are moments of crisis.
That's when he reacts most vividly ”.
After knowing the sentence, Sarkozy charged in an interview in the newspaper
Le Figaro
against the magistrates, threatened to take the case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and proclaimed that “if we were in the Russia of Mr. Putin, the defenders of the human rights would denounce that it is very serious.
"I cannot accept being condemned for something I have not done," he said.
In an interview on the nightly news of the private channel TF1, he told the interviewer: "If you were not convinced that I am an honest man, would you welcome me on your newscast as you have?"
The journalist, distraught, did not respond.
The life of Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa (Paris, 66 years old) could be counted as a play in three acts.
First, that of a son of a Hungarian immigrant and a French woman of Sephardic origin who, without going through the elite schools or belonging to their circles, rose to the right then dominated by Jacques Chirac.
In the second, between 2007 and 2012 he held the presidency of the Republic for five years marked by the global economic crisis, marital crises and an atypical way of exercising power.
"He is a man who differs by a style that does not correspond to the modes of intervention of his predecessors," says Roussel.
“In France, the President of the Republic has a symbolic role that requires greater distance.
I don't think he's very sensitive to that. "
The third act would tell of a post-presidency marked by marital happiness, business activities and the search for enrichment, unsuccessful attempts to return to power and, above all, the continuous problems with Justice.
From the alleged financing by Libya of Muammar Gaddafi of the 2007 campaign to excessive spending in the 2012 campaign - the latter case, for which he will be tried as of March 17 - the last ten years of the former president they are the story of his dealings with prosecutors and judges.
No other president has gotten into so many legal problems, nor has he had so many open fronts in this field.
Perhaps it is explained by his tendency to take risks, to play to the limit.
"He is so imbued with himself that he thinks nothing can happen to him," says
Le Monde
journalist
Philippe Ridet, author of the book
Le président et moi
(The President and I), one of Sarkozy's best portraits.
"It is not so much that it is unconscious, but that it is a form of sufficiency."
"He is an excessively seductive character, but also boastful, presumptuous," Ridet continues.
“He has an almost childlike personality.
[French politician] François Bayrou had an expression that was the
barbarian child
.
That is to say, he was someone with something a bit immature and who at the same time could be cruel and not follow the codes ”.
Minc, author of the book
Mes presidents
(My presidents), describes him like this: “He is a totally whole character, in one piece.
He says what he thinks, he is not censored.
It is just as it seems.
So, with respect to Justice, it has never been censored either ”.
Sarkozy: justice acts in France
The essayist, businessman and unofficial adviser to presidents alludes to Sarkozy's attacks on magistrates when he was president.
Wrapped in the flag of the "little French with mixed blood" or "bastard", as he likes to call himself, he denounced the apparent inbreeding of the judiciary, described its members as "peas, all the same among them", and provoked his anger with repeated criticism in cases that shocked the country such as the rape and murder in 2011 of the young Laëtitia Perrais, a case that the sociologist Ivan Jablonka discussed in the book
Laëtitia or the end of men
.
One theory is that his judicial problems are not due to the former president's tendency to act on the edge of the law or that he has felt unpunished, but to an alleged desire for revenge by prosecutors and judges for previous wrongs.
"What I find scandalous in the Sarkozy ruling is that it is not about legalism, but about moralism," says Minc.
"The judge says: 'Being a former president of the Republic, it is more serious.'
But this is not possible!
Justice must treat a former president the same as a homeless person.
If not, he no longer dedicates himself to law, but to morality ”.
Now Sarkozy has it more difficult than ever to return to the Elysee, although this option was already complicated before the conviction.
But the man who gave the French right its last presidential victory, almost 15 years ago, will not disappear from the scene.
The former president maintains a good relationship with Macron, and his support could be key in 2022. For many of his followers, the corruption conviction and the pending cases are the result of unfair cruelty and one more reason to support him.
“For the right, it is a myth.
The right wing loves bosses.
He loved Chirac, he loves Sarkozy.
It is the Gaullist tradition ”, says Minc, alluding to General de Gaulle, hero of the Second World War and founder of the Fifth Republic.
"All his legal problems", says Ridet, "somehow reinforce his legend: that of a guy outside the norms, in his failures and his successes."