Twelve individuals thus took possession of France. They invoked no other title than their mandate as representatives of Paris, and declared themselves legitimate by popular acclamation. In the evening the International and syndicates of the workmen sent delegates to the Hotel-de-Ville. They had on the same day sent a new address to the German workingmen. Their fraternal duty fulfilled, the French workmen gave themselves up to the defence. Let the Government organize it and they would stay by it. The most suspicious were taken in. On the 7th, in the first number of his paper _La Patrie en Danger_, Blanqui and his friends offered the Government their most energetic, their absolute co-operation. All Paris abandoned itself to the men of the Hotel-de-Ville, forgetting their late defections, investing them with the grandeur of the danger. To seize, to monopolize the government at such a moment, seemed a stroke of audacity of which genius alone is capable. Paris, deprived for eighty years of her municipal liberties, accepted as mayor the lachrymose Etienne Arago. In the twenty arrondissements he named the mayors he liked, and they again named the adjuncts agreeable to themselves. But Arago announced early elections and spoke of reviving the great days of 1792. At this moment Jules Favre, proud as Danton, cried to Prussia, to Europe, "We will cede neither an inch of our territories nor a stone of our fortresses," and Paris rapturously applauded this dictatorship announcing itself with words so heroic. On the 14th, when Trochu held the review of the National Guard, 250,000 men stationed in the boulevards, the Place de la Concorde, and the Champs-Elysees cheered enthusiastically, and renewed a vow like that of their fathers on the morning of Valmy.