The _Parlements_, in their resistance to the royal power, showed, as early as the Fronde, a tendency to support each other, but it is particularly in the period of the _Maupeou Parlement_ that the claims to _unity_ and _indivisibility_ became prominent.[73] These remonstrances, as well as the royal responses, were not withheld from the public, as the _ordonnances_ which imposed upon the magistrates the duty of keeping their deliberations secret implied, but were hawked about the streets and eagerly welcomed by the people. Since in times of opposition, each _Parlement_ aroused the sympathies of the citizens under its jurisdiction, their combination for mutual support against the crown extended the area of popular agitation. This exciting literature, issuing from the different courts, had, therefore, an educative effect upon the popular mind, rather in emphasizing the need of some limitation to royal power than in developing distinct and well-defined notions of political laws.[74] The _Parlement_, while professing exemplary obedience to the king, said that there were moral limits to their obedience.[75] That also took a popular turn, in professing to represent the nation or the people in the absence of the States-General. The remonstrance of the _cour des aides_, probably drawn up by Malesherbes, in February, 1771, indicates these popular pretensions. “The courts are to-day the only protectors of the feeble and the unfortunate: there have existed for a long time no States-General and in the greater part of the kingdom no provincial estates; all the bodies, except the courts, are reduced to a mute and passive obedience. No individual in the provinces would venture to expose himself to the vengeance of a _commandant_, of a _commissaire du conseil_, and still less to those of a minister of Your Majesty. The courts are then the only ones to whom it is still permitted to raise a voice in favor of the people, and Your Majesty does not wish to take away this last resource from distant provinces. But this decree, exiling the _Parlement_ of Paris, tends to render this resource illusory.”[76] Notwithstanding this avowed guardianship of the national rights, the feeling gradually grew that these ill-defined fundamental laws were too vague, that the _Parlements_, though persistent, stopped short of pertinacity, and that an aristocratic magistracy was not the real representation of the nation.