Nicolas Sarkozy becomes the first former French president to serve a criminal sentence

• Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday over corruption charges.
• He will only serve one year, and it will be home confinement instead.
• The sentencing is unprecedented in France, and puts Sarkozy in a small club of former world leaders.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced on criminal charges stemming from a corruption scandal on Monday.

Sarkozy, 66, will be the first former French president to do time if the case is not successfully appealed.

While he was given three years in prison, he will only have to serve one of them and the judge allowed it to be carried out under house arrest, rather than in a correctional facility, according to Le Monde.

Known in the French press for his "bling bling" presidency surrounded by celebrities and living the high life, Sarkozy's undoing came in the form of a wire tap that caught his lawyer and other associates in a bribery scheme. Sarkozy was trying to offer a magistrate a lucrative job in exchange for information about a different criminal case against him, according to the BBC.

The only other former French president to face anything similar was Jacques Chirac, who got a suspended two-year sentence in 2011 for giving allies no-show jobs during his time as mayor of Paris.

With the landmark Sarkozy case, prosecutors got close to their initial ask of a four-year sentence with two years suspended.

Sarkozy is also facing another criminal proceeding set to begin on March 17, where he'll be on trial for the "Bygmalian affair" that upended his attempted political comeback ahead of the 2017 election. In that scandal, prosecutors accused Sarkozy of accepting improper campaign contributions during his 2007 presidential campaign from L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

The 2007 Sarkozy campaign is also the source of another investigation that saw the former president charged with "membership in a criminal conspiracy" back in October 2020, with prosecutors accusing him of taking illicit donations from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Sarkozy has 10 days to appeal the sentence from Monday's ruling.