XI. L'ogre de Corse
XI. The Corsican Ogre
The House of Lords overturns O'Connell's conviction, Irish nationalists debate French naval power, and French scientists conquer Mont Blanc.
- Three law lords — Lord Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord Campbell — overruled seven judges and a Tory majority to quash Daniel O'Connell's sedition conviction, with lay peers voluntarily abstaining from the vote.
- At a Dublin Repeal Association meeting, MP Brown roused thunderous applause by suggesting the Prince de Joinville — fresh from bombarding Tangier — might next test whether Gibraltar's rock is truly 'inaccessible.'
- Toulon's municipal council voted 20,000 francs to fête the Prince de Joinville on his return, including 500 francs for each widow of sailors killed in the bombardments of Tangier and Mogador.
- Locksmith's labourer Constantin Lebourgeois, who stabbed his wife twice and leapt from a third-floor window breaking both legs, was sentenced to ten years' réclusion — and had sent 100 francs of his charitable relief money to his wife and children.
- A Brescia inheritance case forced open after twenty years revealed that the testator's illegitimate son and daughter — his sole heirs — had unknowingly married each other, requiring the Pope to annul their union.
- Physicists Bravais, Martins, and Lepileur reached the summit of Mont Blanc on 29 August, enduring −13 °C storms in a tent on the Grand Plateau; no one had previously stayed more than four hours at the summit.
- Théodore Chassériau has published a suite of fifteen etchings illustrating the principal scenes of Shakespeare's Othello.
- Balzac's Philosophie de la Vie conjugale à Paris, published in the latest instalments of Le Diable à Paris, is praised as 'one of the most brilliant pages ever to have issued from his pen.'