The French cities, in spite of their charters of privilege, were neither city-states as in the Holy Roman Empire or the pillars of the political system as in the United Provinces, nor even administrative and regional centres, like in the decentralized monarchies such as England or Hapsburg Spain. Two great phases characterize the evolution of French towns during the early modern period. Until the personal reign of Louis XIV, the municipalities preserved great freedom to manoeuvre, since they were subjected only to control a posteriori by the Chambers of Accounts. As the size of their debt put in danger their role for the state finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert imposed a financial framework by combining the clearing of their debts by partial bankruptcy with a strict regulation of their ordinary expenditure and the submission of the extraordinary expenditure to the preliminary authorization by the intendants, who were direct representatives of the central government in the provinces. However, this policy, characteristic of the absolutist perspective of the royal state, made neither the budget deficits nor the recourse to debt disappear in the eighteenth century.

The municipalities, doubly defined as representative and royal institutions, were to render at the same time the services expected by the urban community to guarantee social peace and to fulfil the financial and military requirements of the state.