Since the turn of the 19th century, the territorial presence of the French state administration has been embodied by the Prefect, heading an apparatus structured at the département level. However, the unity of that local government, personified by this high-ranking civil servant, is actually a legal fiction. In point of fact, the vertical integration of the French administration goes hand in hand with pronounced horizontal compartmentalization, the outcome of methodical, increasingly thorough segmentation of its action in the post-war decades, as its fields of intervention were extended. The state's territorial administration may in fact be seen as a complex whole comprised of executive branches, departments, agencies and agents, whose missions are a combination of authoritarian acts, checks on legality, political and economic regulation, production of public property and community service. This whole, peopled by the majority of government workers (with 966,000 employees in 2007, not counting the huge Education department, or twenty times the central administration personnel) received little attention until recently from French political scientists, who viewed them as simple go-betweens in the downward transmission of national rules, uniformly applied to the entire French territory. This legalistic vision was demolished in the late sixties by sociologists from the Center for sociology of organizations led by Michel Crozier, who pointed up the interdependence between employees of the administration's local services, rooted in their territory, and local elected officials. The latter's action was entirely dependent on the resources controlled by the former, and in return, state bureaucrats needed the legitimacy afforded by the local elected officials so as to implement the policies entrusted to them and to maintain a degree of independence from their superiors. Until the 1982-83 decentralization laws, then, state field agencies played a pivotal role in political and social regulation by safeguarding a combination of the interests of the center and those of the periphery. The state's territorial administration, unsettled by those laws, had to adjust to the changed environment, and showed remarkable resiliency in doing so. The 1964 administrative reforms had structured it around regional administration services and broad département-level executive branches, and that structure had remained virtually unchanged for nearly a half-century. But, with the constant cuts in its resources (its authority, expertise, budgets, and so on), the mounting power of local authorities, the multiplication of participants in public action, and the development of new, complex public problems crossing the lines of administrative purviews, its role had changed substantially. These changes have deprived the Prefects and state field agencies of their central role in territorial governance . Nonetheless, deconcentrated administrative services have succeeded in holding their ground on the local scene by shifting to a dual function including the territorialization of national polices and the facilitating of local partnerships. This repositioning was made possible by the deconcentration policy implemented in 1992, which reinforced the autonomy of the state field agencies with respect to the central administration. Henceforth, rather than applying norms and rules defined disconnectedly, they could adjust them, systematically negotiating goals, types of action, and even the rules, with local actors, and above all with sub-national public authorities. Marginalized with respect to defining both the goals and the substance of public policies, the state's territorial administration has developed a new role, that of facilitator of cooperation between the numerous actors working in territorial communities, backed up by projects and contractual relations at that level, both of which replace the previous regime of implicit arrangements by explicit (if not to say open) negotiation between the prefects and local elected officials. At the same time, they have made for a degree of transverse integration of government policies around priorities as defined by local authorities. The organizational stability and functional lability previously characteristic of the state's territorial administration seem to be things of the past. Institutional reform in the 2000s, with its more binding forms of inter-communal cooperation, more complete decentralization, budget reforms, and agencification, have accelerated the weakening of state's field agencies with respect to both local authorities and the central administration. This paved the way for a broad-based reform of these agencies, begun in 2008 with the Overall Revision of Public Policies (Révision générale des politiques publiques). This reform, motivated by the twofold objective of reducing public spending and reinforcing coordinated government action at the local level, reshapes the perimeter, organization and responsibilities of state's territorial administration. The respective missions of the regional and départemental levels are clearly defined, with priority given to the former, charged with steering government programs and managing deconcentrated budgets to do so. The powers of regional prefects are extended, particularly with respect to département prefects, now accountable to them. Last, a far-reaching program for merging state's field agencies has been implemented so as to structure the administration around eight regional poles and two or three directorates at the département level. These reforms are definite indication that the central reformers have won out. They are the people who have been trying to strengthen the regional level of the administration since 1964, but whose attempts have systematically met with resistance from both the prefectural corps and local elected officials. The current bolstering of the regional level, however noteworthy, is only relatively so, in relation to the département level formerly the basic echelon of territorial administration by the central government, and which has always been the most solidly structured, acting in collaboration with local actors to make government policies operational. This evolution unquestionably marks a major change in the French political and administrative system, possibly even foreshadowing the gradual elimination of the département level. As opposed to the aftermaths of the 1982-83 decentralization laws, drastic cuts are now being made in the personnel and facilities of all département-level executive branches. In the deconcentrated Equipment services for instance, the number of workers, which had remained stable between 1984 and 2005, dropped by one third between 2007 and 2009. However, the declining local presence of the central administration does not imply a loss of influence on the policies conducted there. Despite the risk that the central administration will cease to be central to public management of territorial communities, there is also the possibility that these reforms may revivify its ability to orient local policy. Because département-level executive branches were better at upward transmission, setting the projects of local elected officials ahead of central priorities, than the reverse. Now rid of those cumbersome go-betweens, the state elites can govern from afar - that is, from Paris - by delegating responsibility for implementing its programs and achieving coherence to local elected officials while steering their action precisely through new tools of government such as competitive bidding, financial incitement and sanctions, completed by systems of indicators, reporting, benchmarking, and the encouragement of good practices, all the more efficient in that they no longer rest on hierarchy or negotiation, but on freely conforming autonomous actors.