Musée du Barreau de Paris

A visit to the museum is an invitation to travel through several centuries of French history. Numerous works of art (paintings, sculptures, engravings, etc.) and original documents (manuscripts or print) enable the visitor to relive the Palais de Justice (courts of justice) of the past, magistrates and lawyers of the Ancien Régime as well as trials during the French Revolution (Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette). The museum also showcases the exceptional destiny of lawyers who played a leading role on the political scene as Léon Gambetta and Raymond Poincaré. It reminds of famous scandals in our judicial history, the first being the Dreyfus affair and Zola's trial following the famous "J'accuse!" (with correspondence and working notes of Fernand Labori, who was the lawyer for the two men). Other trials are mentioned, which are named Ney, Cambronne, Mrs. Caillaux, Villain (the murderer of Jaurès) and Stavisky. He had mounted a monumental scam from the Credit Municipal de Bayonne; the trial that resulted was followed by the painter Pierre de Belay, whose widow gave the Order almost 300 drawings, gouaches and paintings to evoke the judiciary world of the 1930s. The last showcases of the museum exhibit the farewell letters to lawyers who tragically died during the Second World War, the Palace Resistance during the Occupation and the pleading notes of Jacques Isorni in defense of Robert Brassillach then of Marshal Petain. These documents make it possible to see how the story of lawyers and justice belongs to our collective memory.
The museum's originality lies in a rich collection of notes, which allow you to see how lawyers have been working since Chauveau-Lagarde (defender of Marie Antoinette) to Jacques Isorni. The visitor can thus consider the museum as a highly illustrated book or as an abundantly captioned picture album. It is for each to discover or rediscover the men and events of the past, with perhaps the temptation to substitute a particular lawyer in the many cases brought or to reform the judgment of yesterday from what we know today.