Indeed, I came here to say exactly this. In very conservative settings like FR and IT "ordinary" professors are the only one that are receiving the full credit and considered to fully teaching or fully research positions.
In the French system, you go into CR (Chargé de Recherche) then DR (Directeur de Recherche).
You're not more likely to be promoted to DR from MdC (Maître de Conférence) or even PU (Professeur des Universités), that's simply a different track, though of course you could switch over.
Research-only positions tend to be more specialized worldwide, usually attached to a specific institute for a given problem domain, rather than teaching-and-research which would be at a generalist university. That makes perfect sense since the primary purpose of a university remains teaching, even if clearly that's rarely a priority for the staff.
Of course some countries do have national generalist research-only institutes, France is actually an example of this.
