The situation in Burgundy's capital after 1668 seems to bear out Nora Temple's claim that the later Bourbons “transformed municipal officials into the petty agents of the bureaucracy,” and reduced them to the status of “simple executives, responsible to the royal government.” A number of other historians have echoed this view. Roland Mousnier, for instance, concluded that “cities and communities were increasingly administered from Paris, then Versailles, by a multitude of arrêts du conseil rendered on the basis of intendants' reports.” Robert Harding argued that although the intendants did not supplant regional governors, they did transform the crown-town relationship from an exchange of reciprocal favors into a routine administrative tutelage. Peter Wallace observed that in the newly acquired city of Colmar, “Royal absolutism ushered in a profound change in the political ethos of the men who served in municipal office. They continued to administer day-to-day civic affairs, but now as bureaucratic agents of the crown.” “Individual urban economies and oligarchies did indeed prosper,” Beik noted in his study of Languedoc, “but, in terms of power, the consulates were at the bottom of the provincial pecking order, and everyone else's gain was their loss.”

Dijon thus fits into a much larger trend in seventeenth-century French state formation. Although not exactly representative, for the situtation in no ancien régime city was ever fully representative, the changing relationship between the municipal government of Burgundy's capital and the crown broadly captures the changing balance between center and periphery in the French state.