The spread of Latin played an important part in changing Roman attitudes to the Gauls. The Gallic provinces were romanized by the end of the second century AD To begin with, romanization took various forms. In Narbonensis, colonization had an immediate impact, in particular by compelling dispossessed local populations to bring new areas under cultivation. The study of terra sigillata was for a long time the main means through which the economic life of Roman Gaul was studied. For a hundred years, histories of Gaul and studies of the area have concentrated on institutional and administrative developments, seeking to establish the exact boundaries of provinces and civitates, to work out precisely how they operated, and to piece together their prosopographies. Gallo-Roman sculpture ought to have been the object of great works of synthesis, or so one might think on the basis of the great number of pieces of sculpted stone which are gathered for the most part in Esperandieu's Recueil.

The history of Gaul reflected its new environment, and the new strategic geography formed by the German frontier and the proximity of Britain, with all the attendant social and economic repercussions. The author treats Narbonensis (formerly Transalpina) separately from the Tres Galliae (formerly Comata). From the Augustan period, neither texts nor inscriptions ever use the term Gallia except in a purely geographical sense, as one might say South America or the Far East. A direct, personal relationship with the emperors is noticeable on several occasions up until the reign of Nero. It was a two-way relationship: after a period of agitation, the Gallic provinces, or rather their elites, remained faithful to the descendants of Caesar, who in turn kept faith with the Gauls. Gallia Comata, which had been organized as a single province since Caesar, was divided into three by Augustus, probably in 27 BC.