• Six blunderbuss-armed conspirators waited at a Madrid street corner to kill General Narvaez as he left the French embassy; an officer's last-minute remorse and a fast watch foiled the plot, and General Prim, Count of Reus, was arrested as the suspected ringleader.
• In Barcelona, two assassins attacked Captain-General Baron de Meer as he left the theatre; 500 men in red bonnets stormed his captors on the Rambla, rescuing the would-be killers, though 40 arrests followed and four were condemned to death.
• Abd el-Kader, ordered by Sultan Moulay Abd er-Rahman to retire to Fez as a private citizen, refused, attempted to flee into the Moroccan desert, and was reported hiding near the salt lakes south of Mascara after his own retinue deserted him.
• The SS Great Britain, Brunel's iron steamship, finally broke free from Bristol's docks on 26 October after nearly a year imprisoned there, requiring a lock to be enlarged and one side cut vertically to let its hull pass.

• A destitute old man in rags presented himself at banker François Delessert's house and returned a sealed packet of 37,000 francs in bearer securities he had found in the street, refusing to break the seal; Delessert repaid him by securing places at the Petites-Maisons almshouse for him and his wife.
• A man near Dijon who believed a fortune-teller's claim that his own curé had bewitched him spent years plotting revenge; recently released from a lunatic asylum as cured, he seized a razor and cut his throat, leaving a wife and three children.
• Some twenty tailors raided a new ready-made clothing shop in Strasbourg's rue des Serruriers, forcing their way in, beating the merchants and trampling goods underfoot, before escaping before police arrived.

Science & Exploration

• King Louis-Philippe issued an ordinance on 30 October reorganising the dissolved École Royale Polytechnique, stripping the Académie des Sciences of its dominant role in appointing professors and reserving final candidate lists to a reformed council of improvement.