At Strasbourg,[33144] on Brumaire 14, the representatives have dismissed, arrested and sent to Dijon the entire staff of the National Guard to serve as hostages until peace is secured; three days afterwards, considering that the cavalry of the town had been mounted and equipped at its own expense, they deem it aristocratic, bourgeois, and "suspect," and seize the horses and put the officers in arrest .-- 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 carriages," and especially "to seek for private stores and monopolies," in short, to exercise manual constraint and strike every one on the spot with physical terror .-- We readily see what sort of soldiers the revolutionary army is composed of.
Naturally, as it is recruited by voluntary enlistment, and all candidates have passed the purifying scrutiny of the clubs, it comprises none but ultra-Jacobins.

Naturally, the pay being forty sous a day, it comprises none but the very lowest class.

Naturally, as the work is as loathsome as it is atrocious, it comprises but few others[33150] than those out of employment and reduced to an enlistment to get a living, "hairdressers without customers, lackeys without places, vagabonds, wretches unable to earn a living by honest labor," "thick and hard hitters" who have acquired the habit of bullying, knocking down and keeping honest folks under their pikes, a gang of confirmed scoundrels making public brigandage a cloak for private brigandage, inhabitants of the slums glad to bring down their former superiors into the mud, and themselves take precedence and strut about in order to prove by their arrogance and self-display that they, in their turn, are princes.--"Take a horse, the nation pays for it!"[33151] said the sans-culottes of Bordeaux to their comrades in the street, who, "in a splendid procession," of three carriages, each drawn by six horses, escorted by a body on horseback, behind, in front, and each side, conducting Riouffe and two other "suspects" to the Reole prison.