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This article attempts to understand the mechanisms of the administration’s participation in the process of creating legal rules. This particular demonstration of bureaucratic power appears contrary to the founding principles of the French Revolution, which denied the existence of an autonomous administrative power. And yet the administration seems to play an institutional double game: first by its official role of execution and application of the law, and second by its producer’s semi-secret activity as the creator of norms. Such a cleavage strikes an institutional system which tends to privilege the separation of powers and to make the nation participate in the elaboration of the law. Drawing on the archives of the administration of Fine Arts under the 3rd Republic, this study tries to offer concrete answers to these observations.