Our panel explores rural and urban resistance to reform experiments in late ancien régime France. Following Turgot’s brief “reform ministry” in 1776 and continuing through the Revolution, the monarchy introduced both liberalizing and more stringent regulatory policies across key socio-economic sectors, yielding mixed outcomes. Paul Maneuvrier-Hervieu examines rural protests in Normandy’s textile industry against reduced customs duties imposed by the 1786 Eden Treaty between France and England. This resistance, expressed in the Cahiers de doléances and at critical moments during the Revolution, affected socio-economic policies and politics in the Revolution. Charlotte Duvette analyzes the strategies of Parisian property owners, builders, and speculators in the 1780s who subdivided and transacted small-scale real estate to develop urban lots, often in defiance of complex regulations. Their actions expose the construction market as a domain of elite resistance to the Crown’s and municipality’s building reforms. Allan Potofsky (Panel organizer) addresses efforts by Parisian urban elites to limit the city’s growth amid mounting environmental concerns over the haphazard development of what was already designated as the “banlieue.” The Crown’s centralization of quarry inspections through the Inspection générale des Carrières provoked resistance from quarry owners and construction “experts” partially stripped of corporate venal inspection privileges. This panel will highlight how the interplay between liberalization and control progressively weakened the state’s socio-economic authority in the vital sectors of textiles, construction, urban development and stone quarries, in the final decades of the ancien régime. Discussant: Pierre Gervais <pierre.gervais@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr>