From 2010 to 2016, journalist reporter and painter Noëlle Herrenschmidt investigated the legal world in all of its facets.
If we all know what a law is, can we explain how a law is created? Could we describe the process, from its conception within ministerial cabinets to its publication within the Journal Officiel?
Following the many steps of a law from its inception to its publication (including the required passage through Matignon, le Conseil d’État, l’Élysée and le Conseil des ministres, le Parlement, and le Conseil constitutionnel), and paying attention to all of the different actors involved, from the janitor to the President of France, Noëlle Herrenschmidt lets us see the beating heart of our republic.

In French. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Born in 1940, Noelle Herrenschmidt started drawing in 1971 for Bayard Presse. She started her reporting career in 1980 covering Mother Theresa in Calcutta and then in Hong Kong and Vietnam in 1990. It was there that she opened her box of watercolors for the first time, which would come to never leaver her side.
She plunged into the judicial world in 1987 with the Barbie trial, then Touvier, for the newspaper La Croix. From 1997 onwards, she acted as the courtroom sketch artist for Le Monde‘s coverage of the Papon trial, the contaminated blood trial, the Dumas trial, and the Clearstream trial.
Also, for 20 years, she explored spaces that are normally closed to the public in order to discover through sketches and testimonial the human side of the men and women who live and work there.
From book to book, she portrays a picture of our day to day society in its essential institutions: justice, health, religion, and contemporary politics.