With decentralization in the Third Republic, the mayor gained a measure of political power in the local community that served as a counter to the prefect's administrative control. As a result of this, the mayor along with the other local political worthies over time developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the prefect, one in which the prefect tended to protect the locality from the incursions of the center and to allow the mayor and the other notables much behind-the-scenes influcence in exchange for their cooperation. This “complicity” between prefects and notables in the periphery, however, went for the most part unnoticed by scholars – with a few notable exceptions – until quite recently. Scholars had a tendency to listen to the rhetoric of formal centralization, which often hid the reality of informal decentralization from view. And instead of considering the significance of the mayor's position as an elected official, most scholars focused on trends such as the continuing manifestations of state centralization in the powers of the prefect, the extension of the state's field services in the periphery, and the diminution of the powers of the mayor due to the professionalization of the civil service and to the increasing complexities of modern life. In short, although the series of decentralizing laws between 1871 and 1884 effectively ended the recurrent pattern of centralization of local governments, most scholars downplayed the importance of these reforms until recently.