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 Capt. 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.

“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 offense.”

The former president has denied wrongdoing throughout the decade-long investigation and protested the decision to be imprisoned while waiting for the result of the appeal.

Emerging from the courtroom after hearing the verdict, Sarkozy told journalists “If they absolutely want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison, but with my head held high. I am innocent."

One of Sarkozy’s sons, Louis, called for a rally Tuesday in support of his father in the high-end Paris district near to where Sarkozy lives with his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

The supermodel-turned-singer has shared photos of Sarkozy's children and songs in his honor on her Instagram feed since his conviction.

Under the ruling, the 70-year-old Sarkozy will only be able to file a request for release to the appeals court once he is behind bars, and judges will then have up to two months to process the request.

The National Financial Prosecutor’s office, or PNF, told Sarkozy the specifics of his detention during a brief formal meeting last Monday, but the details of the discussions have not yet been made public.

A French prison official confirmed to AP that Sarkozy will enter La Sante on Tuesday.

Sarkozy could be held under conditions reserved for high-profile inmates in La Sante’s “vulnerable section,” colloquially known as the “VIP section,” or he could be placed in solitary confinement where he would be kept away from all other prisoners.

If the former president is put in the so-called VIP section, then he’d likely have his own room in one of 18 identical nearly 9-square-meter cells (about 96 square feet) in a wing separated from other general prison inmates.

Botton, who led a high-flying life of luxury and calls Sarkozy a friend he’s known for more than forty years, expressed doubt that the former president will be accorded many special privileges in prison.

“Even if you are president of the Republic, even if you are a very rich man, you decide nothing."

Based on his own experience inside La Sante’s vulnerable section about which he wrote the book “QB4,'' Botton described what Sarkozy could expect in the prison, overall.

Once processed, inmates are handed personal kit by the guards and then led to their cells.

“They will open the cell, and (Sarkozy) will discover where he will go,” he said.

Botton described the cell he’d lived in La Sante: had a small 70-centimeter bed fixed to the floor, a hot plate, and a rented refrigerator, and TV.

Botton said that inmates’ rooms in the VIP section were equipped with showers and fixed landline phones they can use to make calls recorded by prison authorities, but they cannot receive calls on the same line.

Botton told AP that decades ago, he spent an accumulated 602 days in solitary confinement in different prisons but not in La Sante.

Nonetheless he speculates that if Sarkozy is sent to solitary confinement, his experience could be similar.

Botton recalled the shock he experienced when his affluent life crumbled when he was sent to prison the first time decades ago.

“I went for my first time from my 1200 square meter mansion to nine square meters.”

From having a private staff of 11 people outside prison, he found himself cleaning a filthy cell when he arrived, he says.

"That's what we call the shock of incarceration,” he says.

That new reality could face Sarkozy, who ran one of the world’s most powerful countries between 2007 and 2012.

“When you are at 7pm, you are in jail, alone, and you heard that everything is locked, you are alone,” Botton says.

“You are alone. Everything is finished. The game is finished.”

AP Video by Nicolas Garriga and Oleg Cetinic

AP Production by Jeffrey Schaeffer