The Syrian constitutional committee decided for a republic in the summer of 1928. Although High Commissioner Henri Ponsot suspended their activity, the republican regime form remained their favored regime type in Syria. Yet this result of the notables’ politics was not as straightforward as it seems. After the violent re-occupation of French Mandate A Syrian territories against the general revolt (Neep, 2012) the French mandatory power decided for a politics of appeasement and normalization in 1926. The first step of this politique d’entente was the dissolution of the Syrian Federation and the making of a constitution in Lebanon. The second step was uniting the statelets of Aleppo and Damascus into a new polity with autonomy for the Alawites and Jabal Druze. However, there was a fundamental question: what kind of regime type would govern the new state? Monarchy or republic? This paper dwells into the monarchical plans advocated between 1926 and 1928 by some Syrian notables, Henri Ponsot (the French High Commissioner), and various interested parties: the Hashemite rulers in Iraq and Transjordan, the new Sa‘ud ruling house, and some unexpected ex-Ottoman aristocrats such as Abbas Hilmi II, ex-khedive of Egypt. Using new archival research and the Arabic press, I explore the assumptions and concepts motivating French officers and Arab elite individuals in their arguments for a monarchy or a republic. I argue that we can detect a French imperial logic of territorial unification which understood monarchy as key for a stable political community. Similar to British examples, this strategy provided an occasion for opportunistic Arab elite individuals to claim representation and a throne. Usually framed as part of endless negotiations for national independence (Khoury, 1987), or as part of pan-Arabism (Porath, 1996) I insert the 1926-1928 monarchical debates in the context of the other Arab monarchies at the time: the Egyptian, Transjordanian and Iraqi monarchies and, foremost, the new rising house of Sa‘ud. The public debates in the Arabic press about the monarchical idea unearth the Arabic-Muslim reinvention of political Islam and the French diplomatic discussions highlight Christian-racist assumptions about political community the late 1920s.