The Revolution may be considered the dividing line between the ancient and modern régime in France. Many of the horrors of the first period, however, survived far into the second, and although with a more settled government the worst features of the Terror disappeared, prisons remained in character much the same. The Convention no doubt desired to avoid the evils of arbitrary imprisonment, so long the custom with the long line of despotic rulers of France, and would have established, had it survived, a regular punitive system by which prisons should serve for more than mere detention and deprivation of liberty, intending them for the infliction of penalties graduated to the nature and extent of offences. It was decreed in 1791 that the needs of justice should be supported by classifying all prisons in four categories, namely: Houses of detention for accused but untried prisoners; penal prisons for convicted prisoners; correctional prisons for less heinous offenders; houses of correction for juveniles of fewer than sixteen years, and for the detention of ill-conducted minors at the request of their relatives and friends. The scheme thus sketched out was excellent in theory, but it was not adopted in practice until many years later. France again came into the grip of a despotism more grinding than any in previous days. It was choked and strangled by an autocrat of unlimited ambitions backed by splendid genius and an unshakable will. Napoleon, even more than his predecessors, needed prisons to support his authority, and he filled them, in the good old-fashioned way, with all who dared to question his judgment or attack his power. He threw hundreds of State prisoners into the criminal gaols, where they languished side by side with the thieves and depredators whose malpractices never slackened; and he created or re-opened no less than eight civil prisons on the line of the Bastile of infamous memory. These were the old castles of Saumur, Ham, D’If, Landskrown, Pierrechâtel, Forestelle, Campiano and Vincennes. Here conspirators, avowed or suspected, too outspoken journalists and writers with independent opinions were lodged for indefinite periods and often without process of law. It had been taken as an accepted principle that the Emperor of his own motion with no show of right, undeterred and unchallenged, could at any moment throw any one he pleased into prison and detain them in custody as long as he pleased.