The French government's reputation as one of the most centralized in the world, although not undeserved, is nevertheless one that has traditionally been overstated. Long before the Socialist decentralization reforms of 1982 to 1986, which transferred executive powers, administrative functions, and financial resources from the state to local governments, local politicians and administrators had found effective ways of bypassing the formally centralized system to achieve a far greater measure of local autonomy and power than legally permitted or publicly acknowledged. And yet, it has only been in recent years that a majority of scholars have come to recognize the informal decentralization that had its beginnings in the early years of the Third Republic. It is almost as if, once convinced of the hidden power of the periphery, they could not envision its change. As a result, many scholars, although admitting that the reforms have produced formal changes in the local system of government, undervalue their long-term impact.

On average, the most positive accounts of decentralization have come from the administrative law scholars and experts on legislative politics, who have decried the complete lack of reform for nearly a century and today hail the new laws as revolutionary. By contrast, the most negative assessments continue to be made by political sociologists, who for the past decade or two have described the informal, decentralized circuits of power hidden behind the centralized, formal-legal system of local government and now tend to see only read justments in an essentially unchanging local government system.