Until the Second World War, the study of public administration in France was quasi monopolized by administrative law. In the aftermath of the war, however, many initiatives flourished in order to create an administrative science. The initial sketches of this new academic discipline came mainly from public law professors, and were presented as a necessary complement to administrative law. Administrative science was intended to provide a more flexible theoretical framework than traditional administrative law, which was accused of having become obsolete with regard to the numerous institutional breakthroughs that characterized the postwar period. Administrative science was intended to help resolving the theoretical dilemmas faced by the public law theoreticians, which could not be resolved with the merely normative administrative law. Retracing these processes will allow us to understand the meaning of the importation of American Public Administration concepts and methods that lie at the heart of the French administrative science’s birth. The paper will focus on the work of one of the main initiators of this newly born administrative science, Georges Langrod, an administrative law professor. It will be shown to what extent this creation process was based on theoretical importations from the American Public Administration, in order to enhance the analytical comprehension of administration’s informal functioning. Especially, the paper analyzes how the importation and adaptation of one scientific method –the case method-, and of several concepts of Herbert Simon constituted the basis of this French administrative science.
