According to the recent historiography, the guilds of the Old Regime were dynamic and their members were able to use them to their advantage. Guilds organized certainly labor or goods markets based on economic efficiency, but they also had other roles. Guilds distributed dignities between social groups within urban institutions. That’s what shows the union of different communities of the parisian hosiery at the beginning of the 18^th Century. This union is asked by royal authority but disturbs the strategies of economic actors. Merchants are forced to deal directly with looms, while their integration into the urban elite is based on the refusal of manual labor. Their response seeks to articulate the different dimensions of corporation.