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 reign of two years, and on heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy.