maréchaussée

plural maréchaussées

1. historicalA type of guard force in France, French colonies, or sometimes by extension other places, commanded by a marshal (formerly used as a police force before the introduction of the gendarmerie); loosely (chiefly humorous), the police, the constabulary.First known use 18th c.

   Peasant communities were often effectively self-policing, while the newly reorganized maréchaussée served as an ancillary peace-keeping force.

   2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 156

   5 more examples

   I do not unite the Maréchaussée, because that corps is destined for a particular service, to which it will be altogether applied in the course of the next campaign, nor should I think it advisable to convert it to any other purpose.

   1789, George Washington, letter, 6 Feb 1780

   Enquire of the citizen, the mechanic, if he repoſes not more quietly in his houſe from the certainty that it is not now liable to be entered by the marechauſſées, and that it is no longer poſſible for him to be forcibly taken out of it by a lettre de cachet, […]

   1792, Charlotte Smith, “Letter VIII. To Mr. Bethel.”, in Desmond. […], volume I, London: […] G[eorge,] G[eorge,] J[ohn] and J[ames] Robinson, […], →OCLC, page 134

   ‘Malediction,’ he muttered to himself, but then, with that peculiar command over himself which rarely quitted him, he at once recovered, and moved towards the two officers of the maréchaussée, now semi-inebriated.

   1850, Charles Augustus Murray, Miranda

   In Saint Domingue, free men of color and whites were enlisted in the militia and the maréchaussée to hunt runaway slaves, patrol the highways, and suppress maroon colonies […]

   1997 February 1, Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718--1868, LSU Press, →ISBN

   The English sailor Henry Schroeder might have witnessed the mobilization of gens de couleur and slaves for the maréchaussée when he landed in Guadeloupe in 1787 […]

   2012 December 1, Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, UNC Press Books, →ISBN, page 56