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‪How were the different levels of trade measured in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France? To what extent were these measures based on absolute numerical values, or on relative social and political ones? Using the three words gros (wholesale), détail (retail) and regrat, the Ancien Régime guilds made highly localized classifications, not so much of goods as of the actions that linked people to goods, in a complex set of economic, social and legal relationships. This system gradually began to compete with the way in which the King’s Council used the same vocabulary, the same gradation, as a means to delegitimize the local foundations of trade.‪