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How do some highly symbolical professional activities such as consulting activities succeed in creating the faith that is necessary to the continuation and development of their markets? Provided it is from a historical perspective, taking into account field effects, the distinction made by Lucien Karpik between impersonal and personal faith is granted heuristic value in the analysis of how the consultancy market works. Based on confrontations between civil engineers and consulting engineers backed by private industry and state engineers going back to the mid-19th century, the role model for the profession, which lawyers embody perfectly, is represented by a faction  within consulting engineers. Competing for the market with senior officials and entrepreneurs, these consulting engineers seek to impose on their profession impersonal guarantees of their independence and competence. With the extension during the First World War of consulting activities to the new field of the “work sciences,” this liberal model soon had to compete with another form of regulation of the profession based on networks of personal relationships involving leading employers and engineers specialized in the rationalization of work. This paper analyzes the confrontations that took place during the first half of the 20th century between those two factions within consultants along with the reasons why, in the authoritarian context of the Vichy regime, plans for creating an Order of Engineering Consultants eventually failed.