“It took me a long time to succeed in drawing the face of Salah Abdeslam”

This is the end of a historic trial that lasted almost ten months. On June 29, when the verdict will fall, six and a half years after the attacks that plunged Paris into mourning on November 13, 2015, a whole unprecedented legal mechanism will stop. Saved for history, the footage from the trial will not be seen for fifty years and only for research purposes. However, every day, in the four corners of the courtroom of the former Paris court, a dozen cartoonists sketched live some 14 defendants, 330 lawyers and 2,400 civil parties. Using watercolours, felt-tip pen or graphic tablet, they unveiled to the public, in real time, the daily life of an extraordinary trial.

On July 2, most of them will meet in Sceaux (Hauts-de-Seine) in the garden of Noëlle Herrenschmidt, an 82-year-old watercolor reporter, to close this adventure together. The Dean of theJudicial Press Association quickly became the darling of young cartoonists covering the trial. In the courtroom, she never leaves her hair dryer (to freeze the watercolour) and her « work vest », a black fishing jacket, pierced with 18 pockets. “I am a reporter, I have to be able to go everywhere, she explains. I carry all my gear on me. I am both present and transparent. »

” There was all the media construction around Salah Abdeslam, it was not easy to get rid of it. At the end, after ten months, I managed to have it, a little. Valentin Pasquier

As the trial – the last one she covers – draws to a close, Noëlle Herrenschmidt is putting the finishing touches to the book that she will publish in November with Arthur Dénouveaux, the president of Life for Paris, the association of victims and families of victims of attacks of November 13, and the magistrate Antoine Garapon. A watercolor sum of the past ten months.

Despite thirty-five years spent sketching the biggest trials, this veteran of the comic legal chronicle admits to having stumbled on the face of Salah Abdeslam. “It took me a long time to succeed in drawing it. Many of us have caricatured it, aged it… », she admits. “Incarnation of evil”, “figure fantasized for six years”, the only member of the November 13 commandos still alive gave the designers a hard time.

Also listen November 13 trial: Salah Abdeslam’s about-face

“There was all the media construction around him, it was not easy to get rid of it, slips Valentin Pasquier, 30, who followed the trial for France Inter, The Parisian and West France. At the end, after ten months, I managed to have it, a little. » For Corentin Rouge, 39, who covers the trial for Charlie Hebdo (and who, like other cartoonists at trial, does not have a press card), the difficulty is not so much his terrorist status as “a fairly feminine, soft, slender physique”. “There is always something that slips away”, he breathes, as if echoing the questions that still hover over his real intentions that evening.

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