Conflicts of inclusion: Ordering products and gestures between guilds (Paris, 17^th and 18^th Centuries)

Did the weight of the guilds on the Ancien Régime economy correspond to their respective privileges? In fact, these privileges made sense for contemporaries, above all, by their relationship. The example of two Parisian guilds (goldsmiths and lapidaries) shows an obligatory communication of their privileges, whose intelligence came from their competition. Beyond the privilege (on the gem-setting, the sale of jewels), it was the skills, the goods, the individuals who competed for a legal and legitimate access to manufacturing and commercial activities within the city. To do this, the guilds mobilized arguments that went beyond those of practical efficiency, to the benefit of social figures tied together: the merchant against the craftsman, the master against the worker, the creditor against the debtor, the one who orders against the one who performs. Each figure was defined in this relationship. Moreover, by means of the idea of generation or filiation, each privilege was intended to be capable of multiple encompassments: a trade native to another, a material deriving from another, a process at the service of another, a master necessarily working for another, a jurisdiction including in its jurisdiction that of another. More than partition, inclusion linked privileges through disputes that became permanent, structural. People, goods and techniques were thus hierarchized in the daily instability of conflicts (down to the level of shops, of labor relations), and not from a doctrinal or encyclopedic classification. However, far from being an indication of disorder, this conflictuality of the corporations was indeed the result of a generalized principle of order.