The end of the 17^th and much of the 18^th centuries were marked by strong discontent and riots by workers in paper mills, especially in lower Auvergne, in Thiers and Ambert. Highly organized compared to the masters, workers tried to impose their own rules. These corporative practices remained present in the France of the early 19^th century before the emergence of a new labor identity. Analysis of unpublished workers’€™ rules called by paper-makers “the law of the trade”, such as those for the arrondissement of Thiers during the First Empire, shows the persistence of old style corporatism whose aim was to preserve worker privileges made of acquired rights and special advantages. The “law”€ did not content itself with trying to limit the power of entrepreneurs, it also aimed at protecting workers from neighboring ones who were seen as rivals. National legislation, while suppressing part of these kinds of rules, was not able to stem the phenomenon. At the initiative of a master, Pierre Serve, owners attempted to organize themselves in order to propose a common policy. By examining the text of the “law of the trade” and the correspondence of the master paper-makers of Puy-de-Dôme among themselves and with the minister of manufactures and of commerce, it is possible to show the continuity of brotherhoods and the rise of an owner’€™s organization that was tolerated de facto by the State. At the same time, strict legislation was passed that tended to criminalize all worker’€™s activity that had a collective dimension. If this legislation played a role in the loss of vigor of worker action, it must be understood within the context of the decline of paper-making that modified profoundly technical and social relationships and provoked the destruction of earlier forms of labor solidarities.