Former French first lady has vowed to see Nicolas Sarkozy every day he spends behind bars
Instead, she has just kissed her husband goodbye as he checks in for a five-year jail sentence at La Sante, France’s most infamous prison.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (70) has been convicted of conspiring to raise campaign funds from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Bruni herself is also currently under investigation for alleged witness tampering and participating in a criminal association over a campaign to keep Sarkozy out of prison, which she denies.
It’s a far cry from last month’s Paris Fashion Week, where Bruni graced the Saint Laurent show dressed in a plunging chiffon dress paired with a full-length fur coat.
The former first lady has been associated with fashion since she was signed as a model at 19. Her catwalk career saw her work with Christian Dior, Givenchy, Chanel, Versace, and, of course, Saint Laurent. After one show for the brand in the 2000s, she requested to be paid in couture instead of cash.
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Carla Bruni holds hands with her husband Nicholas Sarkozy on the first day of his incarceration. Photo: Reuters
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Born in Turin as the heiress of an Italian rubber company fortune (although she later discovered she was the product of her mother’s affair), Bruni grew up in a hillside palazzo and attended a Swiss finishing school. She had initially planned to study architecture in Paris, where her wealthy family had relocated in the 70s to escape possible kidnap by Marxist-Leninist terrorist group the Red Brigade.
Instead, she went on to become one of the highest-paid models in the world. Then in 1997 she quit modelling to become a musician.
Her first album, Quelqu’un M’a Dit (Someone Told Me), was a hit that sold two million copies. She has gone on to create five more, including her self-titled sixth album Carla Bruni, released in 2020.
Carla Bruni walks the runway during last year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in New York. Photo: Reuters
Her lifestyle had always been suitably rather rock and roll. In the 90s, she had an affair with Mick Jagger, having been introduced to him by Eric Clapton, whom she was also dating. Jagger was married to Jerry Hall at the time, who did not take kindly to the British rocker’s 20-something French mistress. Hall wrote in her memoirs that she’d called Bruni after intercepting a message and insisted she break things off with her husband. Bruni paid no mind, faxing Jagger that she would meet him on his tour stop in Las Vegas.
Bruni has always been supremely French about the business of taking mistresses. “I bore myself silly with monogamy. I prefer polygamy,” she said in a 2007 interview with Le Figaro Madame. She also reportedly had a “brief but passionate” affair with Laurent Fabius , the former socialist prime minister of France.
But it was liberal-conservative Sarkozy who won Bruni round to monogamy. They met when advertising mogul Jacques Seguela sat them next to each other at a dinner in November 2007. Sarkozy had just had a drawn-out divorce with his second wife, but the pair hit it off and were engaged within months.
It was this property the police raided in 2012, after Sarkozy’s lost an election, and his presidential immunity
Sarkozy’s extravagance had earned him the derogatory moniker “le President Bling-Bling” in the press, an image he failed to dispel when he threw Bruni a lavish 40th birthday party where he gifted her a €20,000 Dior ring with a pink diamond in the shape of a heart.
They settled into a blended family with Bruni’s son from a previous relationship (Sarkozy has three sons from two previous marriages) and welcomed a daughter in 2011 – the first child born to a sitting French president. That year she also starred in a Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris.
Rather than live in the Elysee Palace full time during the Sarkozy presidency, the Bruni-Sarkozys preferred to live in a mansion Bruni rented in a gated community in west Paris.
It was this property the police raided in 2012, after Sarkozy’s lost an election, and his presidential immunity.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and wife Carla Bruni. Photo: Getty
The family were not present for the indignity of an ordeal, as they were holidaying in a chalet in Quebec.
Thus began over a decade of legal wrangling over just how Sarkozy funded his 2007 campaign. With her husband turning his back on politics, a seemingly unbothered Bruni returned to making music and continued to attend all the hottest fashion shows in Paris and Milan.
In 2017 she welcomed a journalist for the Evening Standard into their Paris home, where she regaled the reporter with her interactions with Donald Trump, then 45th president of the US and now 47th, after she refuted his claims they had dated in the 90s.
Alongside her music career, Bruni has also become a purveyor of rosé. She and her husband bought Chateau d’Estoublon, an 18th-century castle in Provence with 750 acres of vineyards, in 2020.
“The castle itself is a magic place, full of incredible energy. It’s like my version of the Garden of Eden,” Bruni told Vogue last year.
The Bruni-Sarkozys have been running the business alongside wine expert Jean-Guillaume Prats and entrepreneur Stephane Courbit, marketing their flagship Roseblood d’Estoublon that retails for about €20 a bottle.
She hasn’t stopped modelling entirely, either. Last year she was in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and in May this year, she was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Spain, where she gave an interview about how “meeting my man” was the best moment of her life.
Former French resident Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni. Photo: AP.
She has continued touring her music, and even taken up pole dancing.
She regularly documents her glamorous lifestyle on Instagram, sharing photographs of herself on the red carpet at Cannes over the summer, attending couture shows and holidaying with her husband.
She also posted photos of herself holding Sarkozy’s hand outside the courtroom.
As an independently wealthy woman well before she met Sarkozy, Bruni will no doubt be able to keep herself in the manner she is accustomed to. But being apart from her husband of 17 years will be a trial, alongside the ongoing investigation into her alleged part in the scandal.
Bruni’s biographer insists that the former first lady will visit her husband every day. At least visits to see her incarcerated husband won’t be too dreary. La Sante is located in the trendy district of Montparnasse, close to the centre of Paris.
Sarkozy has vowed to continue to fight his conviction, but must remain in jail while the appeal goes to trial.
Bruni, who also maintains her innocence, has not been charged but remains under judicial supervision as the investigation continues.