Dijon's municipal government returned to a routine, regular pattern in the decades following the passing of the Sun King. The revocation of the 1692 sale of municipal offices, which had led to their concentration in the hands of a few, reliable clients of the Condés and their agents with the ability and willingness to finance the city's needs, led to a partial return to the system of municipal governance established by the arrêt of 20 April 1668. At the same time, further developments consolidated the mairie's transformation from a local governmental body into an arm of the “administrative monarchy.” The mairie's operations, both internally and in its relationship with other local authorities, were marked by the increasingly impersonal, mechanistic procedures and greater sense of routineness and predictability that a number of historians have argued became characteristic of the French state's evolution during this period. Supervision by the region's governors, intendants, and their agents became even more thorough and systematic. With the exception of relatively mundane matters, the mairie's officers rarely acted on their own initiative, looking instead for guidance from above. In this new context, it is hardly surprising that local political culture evolved in response and that the city's avocats would continue to be drawn to regional customs, local history, and the dictates of reason—embodied in the figure of “public opinion”—as alternatives to an official ideology that largely excluded them from both public life and political debate.