The French reading of Kelsen (or how to misinterpret an author and make him say what he does not say)

In this paper, I aim to show that in France, Kelsen’s vision of Stufenbau is widely misunderstood and that his name is associated with a specific concept of the “hierarchy of norms” that has nothing to do with his writings. Indeed, the French legal doctrine rejects Kelsen as a whole, but keeps on using a somehow modified version of Kelsen’s concept, called rather “pyramid of norms” rather than “hierarchy of norms”. This very French version of the concept is both used as a way to legitimate the legal order and to criticize legal positivism as a whole, missing far and wide Kelsen’s original point. The main consequence is that in France, Kelsen’s work is mostly restrained to this aspect of his writings, leaving him mostly unread and misunderstood when his name and concepts are used in the first classes of legal studies.