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Revisiting the figure of the citizen-soldier, an emblem of Genevan republicanism developed in the eighteenth century and constantly echoed by historiography, calls for a closer look at the primary sources. A review of the issue not only requires that we analyze, as much as possible, the internal organization of the bourgeois militia companies, but also that we identify their functions in relation to the increasing role the garrison played. Funded by indirect and direct taxes, the garrison was mostly composed of foreign soldiers; it first performed nightly patrols in lieu of the citizens before evolving into an armed police force in the early eighteenth century. This restructuring of military power in the city reflects first and foremost the mutation of daily policing activities. It expresses a reconfiguration of social regulation, in which the forms of community controls fade. Though this was common in other cities, such a perspective does not invalidate the status of Geneva as a unique republican city-state. The strengthening of the garrison, the military arm of the government, was first realized at the expense of its subordination to popular sovereignty. However, redefined by intense political struggles and debates, its military power was gradually subject to a legal framework that legitimized the use of physical force. Consent to military taxation, ratification of laws on the status of the garrison and its functions were means of popular control which established a public force dissociated from personal military service.