Far from theological discourses opposing cloister and the world, convent became part of the city. It intensified relations with the local society. Distinction between the latter and the notion of the world was reinforced, enabling nuns to assert their identity in the city and in the order itself. Coming from its environment, convents played an essential role in the society as an economic as well as a religious agent. External changes provoked a necessary adaptation which ended in the transformation of conventional mentality. However, synthesis between outside action and inside spirituality stays efficient. A social and global analysis gets the picture of religious communities and calls for a reconsideration of eighteenth-century religious views.