V. Le repas des fiançailles
V. The Betrothal
France's Morocco campaign, the Académie française prizes, and a Paris conspiracy trial dominate this issue.
- At the Irish Repeal Association, MP Kelly mocked England's Mediterranean fleet of two warships as France bombarded Tangier and seized Mogador, drawing loud applause from the Dublin crowd.
- The Prince de Joinville released 150 Moroccan prisoners unconditionally after the fall of Mogador's island fort; the freed men kissed their captors' hands and cursed Sultan Abd al-Rahman.
- The English Vice-Consul at Mogador and his wife were held hostage for five million francs in debts owed to the Sultan; France's act of freeing wounded prisoners secured their release where British warships had failed.
- A boiler explosion on the Saône steamboat Zéphyr left one stoker with skin and flesh stripped from his bones by scalding steam, described in harrowing detail by eyewitnesses at the port of La Colonne.
- After an all-night session, the jury in the Paris conspiracy trial acquitted Charbonnier de la Guesnerie and de Lespinois of complicity, while convicting Cauchard and Toutain to two years' imprisonment for proposing a legitimist conspiracy to army sappers in a tavern.
- At the Académie française prize day, the unknown Monsieur Harel won the eloquence prize for a discourse on Voltaire, astonishing the audience with what the reporter called the finest French prose style since Voltaire himself.
- The Académie renewed its history prize to the blind historian Augustin Thierry, praising his ongoing work collecting documents on the history of the Third Estate despite the loss of his sight.
- The Montyon virtue prize went to Father Grégoire Girard, a Swiss Franciscan who argued that the mother tongue, not mathematics, is the true instrument of moral education — citing a debate in which he bested Pestalozzi with the argument that a son's love for his father cannot be proved like two plus two.