The idea of this article is to study the effects of the development of the Lyon workers’movement on the practices and representations of credit relationships in the city’s silk industry. It is especially focused on the debates that followed the establishement of a loan bank for the silk weavers in 1831-1832. In these debates, the workers discuss about the significance and utility of this new mechanism, which was offered to replace the bilateral relationship between the workshop head and the merchant.The weavers’thought on this matter exhibits several turning points, in 1834, 1848, until the great 1876 silk crisis, which are tightly dependent on the evolution of the silk weavers’movement during the 19th Century.