Science certainly influenced growing intellectual caution about the reality of witchcraft during the seventeenth century, but the key to the end of the witch trials was the developing sophistication of jurisprudence and the increasing centralisation of judicial authority as absolutist states extended their control over their citizens. Witchcraft was decriminalised and demoted to the status of a false belief by the Witchcraft Act of 1736. The confessional propaganda battles that began with the Reformation continued to be played out at the end of the nineteenth century in regions such as the Netherlands and southern Germany where Catholic and Protestant clergy rubbed alongside each other for influence. The Napoleonic state provided the political and structural conditions for imposing medical control, the Law of Ventôse imposed a national system of medical licensing. In Britain, the 1858 Medical Act created a medical register that made it easy to identify unlicensed medical practitioners, thereby enabling the police to better pursue quacks and cunning folk.