While the Girondists wavered and lost ground, the Jacobins were organised and were preparing for the battle. They had behind them all the authority of the Commune of Paris, the prestige of the well-known leaders of the Mountain, and the forces of the two great Clubs. They had, owing to the apathy of their opponents, obtained the control of most of the Sections. They had practically the military power too. After the 10th August, the National Guard had been organised afresh into forty-eight battalions, one for each Section. The artillery of the Guard had been separately organised, and the artillerymen, recruited from the poorest class, formed a body on whom the Jacobins could generally depend. The old bourgeois members no longer appeared, but paid Sansculottes to do their duty for them; and the nucleus of a fighting force was formed by the men of the 10th August and of the 2nd September, who could be relied on to act as the Commune required. Besides that, in the middle of May, the Commune ordered the enlistment of a special force of Sansculottes, which was organised later as the Revolutionary Army. Further, the Jacobins had the control of the police. Each Section had its elected police-commissioners, acting under the direction of the Commune, and as a matter of fact police-commissioners became in many Sections insurrectionary leaders. Thus the forces which existed nominally to protect the friends of order, had become the active agents of the other side. The Committees of Supervision lately instituted by the Convention, and known before long as Revolutionary Committees, sat in every Section, denouncing, disarming, and fining their enemies, dealing out certificates of 'civism' to their allies, forming ready centres of Jacobin intrigue, and arranging plans for a general rising. If ever the Moderates dared to assert themselves in the Sections, the Jacobins could call in the authority of the police, and thus secure the arrest of their opponents. All that they wanted was time to organise their forces, so as to make the success of an insurrection certain. To these preparations Girondists had nothing to oppose. They too must have realised that the question had come to be one of force, and yet they took no steps to gather forces for themselves. They inspired no enthusiasm in the capital. There was no class in Paris on whom they could rely. The National Guard would not rise to defend them. They had no guard or organisation of their own. Neither the aristocrats nor the bourgeois recognised them as leaders, and they made few efforts to rally the partisans of order round them. The Girondists, it is true, had eloquence and parliamentary battalions, and they were probably right in believing that the majority of citizens preferred their policy and conduct to those of their opponents. But these advantages were of little weight or value when physical force lay in the other scale.