PARIS — You can be a disgraced former minister, a president who couldn’t win reelection, an underdog who thinks he has a shot at a title, an ousted prime minister eager to explain what you did or didn’t do, or a political cold fish who thinks everyone should get in touch with your funny side: In France, if you want to get ahead, you first publish a book.

No political career can be taken seriously without one, or preferably several, to show voters that a real person, a cultured and sophisticated mind, has always been hiding behind the sound bite. Underneath all the political posturing, readers will surely see, beats the sensitive heart of an auteur.

It’s a long tradition, but an anything-goes campaign leading up to France’s 2017 presidential election, in a political world replete with former losers eager to get their revenge at the polls, is proving especially fertile for the publishing business.

The latest example is a bit of a sales sensation. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s La France pour la vie (“France for life”), published three weeks ago, has been at the top of France’s (notoriously unreliable) best-seller lists. It also leads the all-categories list (fiction, non fiction and in-between) on Amazon’s French site.

The book has always occupied a strong symbolic space in France.

In the last six months all of the other potential candidates for the conservative party’s nomination in 2017 have also published their own books. Some of them did well even without the conservative party sales pitch to members that has boosted Sarkozy’s numbers.

Alain Juppé, a former prime minister and foreign minister, has written two books since the summer of 2014, and intends (“threatens,” says one of his ever-friendly rivals) to publish two more by the end of this year. François Fillon, Sarkozy’s own prime minister from 2007 to 2012, was also an unlikely best-seller late last year with his platform-cum-memoir Faire (“To Do”).

Christian Delporte, a professor of history at Versailles University, sees two reasons French politicians are so eager to show their literary credentials. “The first is that French political leaders have always written a lot — you can see it in a literary tradition going back to the 19th, 18th century,” he says.

“The second reason is that French politicians never die,” says Delporte, himself the author of a recent book, “The Art of the Political Comeback.” That means there always comes a time when they feel they need to revisit their experience or explain what they want to do in the future.

Writing a book gets politicians closer to the intellectual-statesman model many think will help boost their career. It is also seen as a way to connect directly with readers/voters, take the time to dwell on regrets for things done or not done, explain what went wrong, and of course promise it will be better next time. Even a book conceived as a long-winded political platform (“let me spell out in great detail what we should do”) seemingly can’t be written without the odd personal detail or observation thrown in.

“The book has always occupied a strong symbolic space in France,” says Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris. “In a politician’s career it means seriousness, the ability to think and analyze.”

It also offers a chance to put past mistakes in a new context. “In a political comeback strategy, it is meant to show that the author has been able to escape the short-term horizon that constrained his previous life,” Cautrès says. “Very often, the disgraced politician who was ousted or resigned for a scandal of some sort gives that as an excuse: He didn’t have ‘time’ to check on his underlings, or to mind the details of what was going on.”

Adds Delporte: “The book is an object of culture. Publishing it means you have ideas. Having ideas means you have thought about things. Which in turn gives what you say some authority.”

‘I’ve changed’

Depending on the author, however, a book can serve different purposes.

The most common template these days in France — where the political theater has been played for 20 years with the same actors in ever-shifting roles — is the “I’ve changed” book.

Sarkozy’s latest tome loosely belongs to that sub-genre. Even as he has protested in many interviews since its publication that he is not apologizing for his presidency (save for the occasional publicly proffered obscenity or “useless provocations”), Sarkozy spends most of the book explaining to readers that his political downfall “taught” him a lot.

The range of subjects taken on by politicians is impressive. Sarkozy, 20 years ago, wrote a biography of French Jewish World War II politician and resistance leader Georges Mandel.

“It enriched me on a human level,” he writes.

Sarkozy’s Républicain rival, Juppé, didn’t write that type of book this year, probably because he had already done so a decade ago — after spending a couple of years teaching at a Quebec university to wait out a sentence banning him from electoral politics for corruption. This time Juppé is focusing on another category of political book: the detailed platform, which he is parceling out in themed tranches.

He has published installments on education (last year) and security (last month). Next up: the economy. Even so, perhaps aware that the platform genre needs some spicing up, Juppé is constantly weaving in segments of the “I’ve changed” genre. Long known for his arrogant and technocratic style, he never misses an opportunity to tell the world that he now spends his time “listening” to French people of all stripes.

‘I can explain everything’

When written by politicians who have already served at the highest level — former presidents or prime ministers — the platform books often belong to another sub-category: “Excuses for what I didn’t do.” Fillon’s opus is replete with explanations for why, deep inside, he meant well but was constrained by Sarkozy, who was, after all, his boss.

Fillon tells the reader that in essence he always knew “most French problems have a simple solution,” but that Sarkozy didn’t agree with his view that it was, quite simply, “freedom.” Fillon, who in 2006 wrote a book entitled “France can withstand the truth,” apparently discovered that his president couldn’t.

Ideally, at some point during a French politician’s career he or she should also write a book to show the world another side of himself or herself. This could be anything from the biography of a famous historical character to a manifesto on a newfound cause. That can lead to bizarre statements such as one from Juppé, in 2008, that he would “no longer eat cherries in winter” (the actual title of a book he wrote on the environment).

Of course publishing a book guarantees a form of media coverage that wouldn’t be available to the ordinary official simply campaigning to be elected.

The range of subjects taken on by politicians is impressive. Sarkozy, 20 years ago, wrote a biography of French Jewish World War II politician and resistance leader Georges Mandel. Juppé last year penned a biography of Montesquieu, the Age of Enlightenment essayist and separation-of-powers theorist from Bordeaux — the city of which Juppé is the mayor. The list goes on: former Socialist culture minister Jack Lang wrote a biography of Renaissance King Francis I; former conservative education minister François Bayrou wrote one of France’s Henri IV.

Most of these books met with underwhelming critical and popular success but as Delporte notes, the aim is mostly “for the politician to hint at some sort of connection with the great man, to get some of his greatness by association, so to speak.”

The scholarly work genre seems less popular in the age of seemingly permanent current-day crises. “That category has receded somewhat,” Cautrès says, as French politicians keep their literary ambitions on a more pragmatic level. “In a context of economic crisis, and the general mistrust of politicians, they tend to stick to the theme of how to deal with France’s problems.”

Of course publishing a book guarantees a form of media coverage that wouldn’t be available to the ordinary official simply campaigning to be elected.

François Hollande has been the one notable outlier this year on the politico-literary front. The current French president has never been a big fan of solo book-writing. Most of the books he has written in the past, all quickly forgotten, have been co-authored, usually with a journalist tasked with asking the questions and writing up the interchange. He made an exception for his presidential campaign in 2012 with Changer de destin (“Change our Fate”), but it’s safe to say the book was not the major reason for his election.

The co-author template at least has allowed Hollande to avoid the suspicion hanging over all of the politicians’ books: Did they actually write them themselves? A few years ago, when two politicians appeared on the same TV show to talk about the historical biographies they’d just published, the joke soon made the rounds that neither one seemed to have read his own book. It has now become a de rigueur disclaimer for a political author on a book tour or in an interview to insist that “I wrote it myself.”

That’s certainly not something that can be doubted in the case of Sarkozy’s new book, which reads as if the former president dictated it straight onto the page.