There have not been a great many studies of the influence of customary law on the structuring of urban society. Yet the bourgeoisie of the Old Regime is a category formed by customary patterns of marriage and inheritance, such as the marriage community between husband and wife, or equal inheritance. The Parisian example illustrates the extent to which customary law always set a very strong egalitarian standard for merchant families in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while leaving room for non-egalitarian practices aimed at the survival of their businesses. In fact, the guild membership of these families necessarily engendered a transferral of their domestic practices into a public sphere which was itself rife with tensions between corporate egalitarianism and an elitist concentration of power. Here, the way that society was regulated went hand in hand with the way that political power was exercised. The equality prescribed by customary law thus served to establish equal status among notables who were distinguished from the common people by the honorific offices they derived from the merchant guilds, the merchant court or the municipality [80].