Since the sixteenth century, France had been wrestling with the problem of how to adjust two hostile faiths to each other. Farther to complicate the matter, a schism occurred in the seventeenth century within the Catholic Church, which aroused between Jesuits and the Jansenists a feeling of intolerance, well-nigh as violent and determined as that which already existed between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Even in the eighteenth century intolerance, held in partial abeyance, frequently broke out in overt acts, which displayed the vindictiveness of the hostile parties. The philosophers, more interested in humanity than in the prejudices of any faction, championed in the name of tolerance the party persecuted. The new spirit gained support. The writings of the latter half of the eighteenth century abound with denunciations of intolerance and with pleas for tolerance.[23] By and by the movement was fruitful, and on January 19, 1788, the _Parlement_ of Paris registered a decree giving civil rights to Protestants.[24] “Art. 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for the abuse of this freedom as shall be defined by law.” Here too is an attempt to secure permanently that for which a long struggle had taken place. Two powers, the Church and Royalty, had labored, now singly and now together, to regulate the expression of ideas. The writing and the writer had been equally the object of royal inclemency—the one being consigned to the flames, the other to prison. But in spite of royal decrees, public sentiment gravitated towards liberty of expression. In 1776, Malesherbes secured the opening of the prisons of Vincennes and the Bastille for the release of prisoners held under _Lettres de cachet_.[25] Again, in 1784, in response to Mirabeau’s “_Lettres de cachet_,” the dungeons of Vincennes were opened.[26] “Art. 12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires a public _force_. This _force_ is, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom it shall be entrusted.”