The last manipulators of the system remain, the hands which seize, the armed force which takes bodily hold of men and things.--The first who are employed for this purpose are the National Guard and the ordinary gendarmerie. Since 1790, these bodies are of course constantly weeded out until only fanatics and robots are left;[33143] nevertheless, the weeding-out continues as the system develops itself. 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; Ysoré 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, Besançon, Belfort, Bourg, Dijon, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Auch and Nantes.[33147] When, on March 27, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety, threatened by Hébert, has them disbanded for being Hébertists, 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 régime is established and lasts. "The revolutionary army,[33149] say the orders and decrees promulgated, "is