est.--At Troyes,
Rousselin, "National civil commissioner," dismisses, for the same
reason, and with not less dispatch, all of the gendarmes at one stroke,
except four, and "puts under requisition their horses, fully
equipped, also their arms, so as to at once mount well known and tried
sans-culottes." On principle, the poor sans-culottes, who are true at
heart and in dress, alone have the right to bear arms, and should a
bourgeois be on duty he must have only a pike, care being taken to take
it away from him the moment he finishes his rounds.[33145]

But, alongside of the usual armed force, there is still another, much
better selected and more effective, the reserve gendarmerie, a special,
and, at the same time, movable and resident body, that is to say, the
"revolutionary army," which, after September 5, 1793, the government
had raised in Paris and in most of the large towns.--That of Paris,
comprising six thousand men, with twelve hundred cannoneers, sends
detachments into the provinces--two thousand men to Lyons, and two
hundred to Troyes;[33146] Ysabeau and Tallien have at Bordeaux a corps
of three thousand men; Salicetti, Albitte and Gasparin, one of two
thousand men at Marseilles; Ysore and Duquesnoy, one of one thousand men
at Lille; Javogues, one of twelve hundred at Montbrison. Others,
less numerous, ranging from six hundred down to two hundred men,
hold Moulins, Grenoble, Besancon, Belfort, Bourg, Dijon, Strasbourg,
Toulouse, Auch and Nantes.[33147] When, on March 27, 1794, the Committee
of Public Safety, threatened by Hebert, has them disbanded for being
Hebertists, in any of them are to remain at least as a nucleus, under
various forms and names, either as kept by the local administration
under the title of "paid guards,"[33148] or as disbanded soldiers,
loitering about and doing nothing, getting themselves assigned posts of
rank in the National Guard of their town on account of their exploits;
in this way they keep themselves in service, which is indispensable,
for it is through these that the regime is established and lasts. "The
revolutionary army,[33149] say the orders and decrees promulgated, "is
intended to repress anti-revolutionaries, to execute, whenever it is
found necessary, revolutionary laws and measures for public safety,"
that is to say, "to guard those who are shut up, arrest 'suspects,'
demolish chateaux, pull down belfries, ransack vestries for gold and
silver objects, seize fine horses and