What people say is often as important as what people do. Saying is also a form of doing. Sometimes it adds understanding to what people do, other times it hides what people do from themselves as well as from others. How people say what they say, and to whom they say it, moreover, may very well alter the sense of their words, which may thus mean different things to different people. So it was with the rhetoric surrounding the issue of decentralization.

The reality of French local government, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, was that local elected officials had a great deal of hidden power and authority, both political and administrative. But these officials were the last to admit this, using a rhetoric that instead suggested they were essentially powerless next to the central and centralizing state, and apolitical next to the political and politicizing national government. With this rhetoric, in effect, they threw up a wall of words to obscure the reality of an informally decentralized and politicized periphery.

With the rhetoric of centralization, more specifically, local elected officials strove to hide their complicity with local administrators from public view. By complaining about the administrative centralization of the state and its financial stranglehold over local authorities, they sought to draw attention away from the reasonable amount of administrative freedom and financial resources their complicity afforded them.