Supermodel, singer and former first lady of France Carla Bruni, 57, must have been hoping to continue enjoying her glamorous Parisian life. Instead, she has just tearfully kissed her husband goodbye as he checks in for a five-year jail sentence at La Santé, 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 Paris Fashion Week last month, where Bruni graced the Saint Laurent SS/26 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 high-flying 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, selecting a daring backless gown.
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 Seventies 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, regularly earning £4.7 million a year and bagging some 250 magazine covers. Then in 1997 she quit modelling full time to become a musician. Her first album, Quelqu’un M’a Dit (Someone Told Me), was a hit that sold two million copies. She’s gone on to create five more, including her self-titled sixth album Carla Bruni, released in 2020.
Her lifestyle had always been suitably rather rock and roll. In the Nineties she embarked on an affair with Mick Jagger, having been introduced to him by Eric Clapton, who she was also dating. Jagger was married to Jerry Hall at the time, who didn’t 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 Séguéla 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.
Sarkozy’s extravagance had earned him the derogatory moniker ‘le Président 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.
The late Karl Lagerfeld, who knew Bruni from her modelling days, approved of the match. “They are hunters who met — predators,” he told Vanity Fair for a profile on the new First Lady. “He had seduced many women, and she was a kind of seductress.” 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 Élysée Palace full time during the Sarkozy presidency, the Bruni-Sarkozys preferred to live in a beautifully appointed 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. The family weren’t 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 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 Nineties. “He sent me a little note, ‘How can you say that? I’m gonna sue you’. I sent him a little note — ‘Go ahead!’”
Alongside her music career, Bruni has also become a purveyor of rosé (she far prefers wine and champagne to cocktails, she’s fond of telling interviewers). She and her husband bought Château 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 Stéphane Courbit, marketing their flagship Roseblood d’Estoublon that retails for £19 a pop.
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 a gushing interview about how “meeting my man” was the best moment of her life. She’s 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 beloved 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.
