— Changes in the functions of public administration inspection: a perspective — Do the heritage and tradition of the State’s inspection bodies (inspectorates) agree with the metamorphoses that are taking place? If the professionals’ personal experiences tend to emphasize “change”, institutions are also spaces of invariance. Beginning with a reflection about the difficulty of thinking about change, the author puts forward a few precautions. The second concept analyzed is the one of “control” and the problems it raises. Indeed, “control” in practice is always localized, written in specific institutional knowhow. It is not necessarily a trans‑institutionally shared notion and it has a non‑negligible part of self‑persuasion. However events such as LOLF, RGPP and MAP contributed to reinvent the state, bypassing the public/private divide through a “governance by numbers”. These changes involve, for the inspectorates, a passage from the search for “regularity” to “performance” which in turn involves the development of a range of activities and certain institutional innovations.