Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #111 - Gendarmes

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Gendarmes

Many states throughout history have had paramilitary forces. Gendarmes, Carabinieri, Security Police, Presidential Guard, the names vary, but the purpose is always the same. They are directly loyal to the government rather than the state, and often loyal only to the leader.

The gendarmes stand outside the chains of command of both the army and the local police, and their job is to maintain internal security. They can act as riot police, but also more covertly to root out dissent within both the army and local police (who may be corrupt, inefficient, or just more loyal to their community than the government). In some cases, such as the Romanian Securitate, they can actually end up better armed than the regular army. But this high standard of training, equipment and cohesion as well as the close access to the levers of power can also mean that the gendarmes can become a political force, influencing policy to protect themselves and even deposing or choosing leaders as the Roman Praetorian Guard did.

Tell me a story of gendarmes from your setting ! Are they an essential stabilising force, or instruments of tyranny ? Do the ordinary people fear them, or see them as better than crooked local police ? Who commands them, and what influence do they have on the politics of the state ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.