s resolution was yet repugnant to the feelings of
France, and if the Assembly had feared they had given birth to a
republic prematurely, the third course was yet open, to proclaim the
temporary cessation of royalty during ten years, and govern in a
republican form in its name until the constitution was firmly and
securely established. This course would have saved all the respect due
to royalty; the life of the king--the life of the royal family--the
rights of the people--the purity of the Revolution--it was at once firm
and calm, efficacious and legitimate. It was such a dictatorship as the
people had instinctively figured in the critical times of their
existence. But instead of a short, fugitive, disturbed, and ambitious
dictatorship of one man, it was the dictatorship of the nation,
governing itself through its National Assembly. The nation might have
respectfully laid by royalty during ten years, in order itself to carry
out a work above the power of the king. This accomplished, resentment
extinguished, habits formed, the laws in operation, the frontiers
protected, the clergy secularised, the aristocracy humbled, the
dictatorship could terminate. The king or his dynasty could ascend
without danger a throne from which all danger was now averted. This
veritable republic would have thus resumed the name of a constitutional
monarchy, without changing any thing, and the statue of royalty would
have been replaced on its pedestal when the base had been consolidated.
Such would have been the consulate of the people, far superior to that
consulate of a man who was to finish by ravaging Europe, and by the
double usurpation of a throne and a revolution.

Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well
governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the
throne, what prevented it from saying, I now assume as a definitive
government that which I assumed as a dictatorship: I proclaim the French
republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a
regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and
constituted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is
the attitude of a people in travail!

In a word, the Constituent Assembly, whose light illumined the
globe--whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one
fault, that of coming to a close. It should have perpetuated itself: it
abdicated. A nation that abdicates after a r