The cue having been thus dextrously given, appeals and petitions for hereditary rule began to pour in from all parts of France.  The grand work of the reorganization of France certainly furnished a solid claim on the nation’s gratitude.  The recent promulgation of the Civil Code and the revival of material prosperity redounded to Napoleon’s glory; and with equal truth and wit he could claim the diadem as a fit reward for having revived many interests while none had been displaced. Such a remark and such an exploit proclaim the born ruler of men.  But the Senate overstepped all bounds of decency when it thus addressed him:  “You are founding a new era:  but you ought to make it last for ever:  splendour is nothing without duration.”  The Greeks who fawned on Persian satraps did not more unman themselves than these pensioned sycophants, who had lived through the days of 1789 but knew them not.  This fulsome adulation would be unworthy of notice did it not convey the most signal proof of the danger which republics incur when men lose sight of the higher aims of life and wallow among its sordid interests.[306]

After the severe drilling of the last four years, the Chambers voted nearly unanimously in favour of a Napoleonic dynasty.  The Corps Legislatif was not in session, and it was not convoked.  The Senate, after hearing Fouche’s unmistakable hints, named a commission of its members to report on hereditary rule, and then waited on events.  These were decided mainly in private meetings of the Council of State, where the proposal met with some opposition from Cambaceres, Merlin, and Thibaudeau.  But of what avail are private remonstrances when in open session opponents are dumb and supporters vie in adulation?  In the Tribunate, on April 23rd, an obscure member named Curee proposed the adoption of the hereditary principle.  One man alone dared openly to combat the proposal, the great Carnot; and the opposition of Curee to Carnot might have recalled to the minds of those abject champions of popular liberty the verse that glitters amidst the literary rubbish of the Roman Empire: 

  “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.”

The Tribunate named a commission to report; it was favourable to the Bonapartes.  The Senate voted in the same sense, three Senators alone, among them Gregoire, Bishop of Blois, voting against it.  Sieyes and Lanjuinais were absent; but the well-salaried lord of the manor of Crosne must have read with amused contempt the resolution of this body, which he had designed to be the guardian of the republican constitution: 

“The French have conquered liberty:  they wish to preserve their conquest:  they wish for repose after victory.  They will owe this glorious repose to the hereditary rule of a single man, who, raised above all, is to defend public liberty, maintain equality, and lower his fasces before the sovereignty of the people that proclaims him.”

In this way did France reduce to practice the dogma of Rousseau with regard to the occasional and temporary need of a dictator.[307]