Notwithstanding that, the feverish activity of the nation, its sacrifices during the wars of the Republic and the Empire, greatly restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitution, which Napoleon I. regarded with horror.[22] M. M. Pasquier and D’Anglés subsequently made a demand, but vainly, for effectual measures for extirpating this social canker; in presence of its rapid progress, honest magistrates and upright counsellors felt the necessity of having the old enactments put again in force. Tavern-keepers, harbourers of prostitutes were, at the instance of the public ministry, often brought before the Court of Correctional Police, and condemned to a fine, by the application to them of the enactment of 6th November, 1778. The Court of Cassation had quashed these verdicts but three times up to the year 1866, when the before-mentioned enactment received its last application from the Correctional Court of the Seine, which expressed the wish to see the laws of former times again put in force in modern legislation. Since that period, our judges, alleging their limited powers, declare that the fact of the tavern-keepers admitting prostitutes is only a breach of police-regulations, satisfied by a fine fixed at five francs, by the application of the article 471, No. 15, of the Penal Code.[23] It is useless to say that this fresh moral weakness, by rendering the most cynical impunity in these immoralities certain, permits young men freely to indulge in illicit intercourse. Our Code referring all the means for repression to the _police_, it remains to be seen how this discretionary power acts with respect to the pander who procures the debauchery, to the man who pays for it, and to the woman who is the subject of it. The brothel-keeper, as we know, acquires a right, even a monopoly, by becoming the mistress of a licensed brothel; her privileges are sacred to the degree that no one may meddle with them as regards that matter. I have no longer to touch upon the respect we owe to the _ladies of the house_, and I pass over that infamy. As for the individual sufficiently degraded to seek for the gratification of his brutal appetite in debauchery, he is under the very special protection of the public power, which keeps watch, night and day, to sanction his rights. The police by the Vagrants’ Act, it is true, strike down in the lower classes a few debauchees among respectable people, but for every man who has a home there is no curb; the “magistrate for morals” goes so far even as to object to the tears and supplications of a mother who implores him to take pity on the soul of her son, losing his health, money, and honour in brothels.