XLI. La présentation
XLI. The Introduction
French parliamentary debates on primary schoolteachers' pay, Ottoman festivities, and a massacre aboard an Austrian steamer dominate this issue.
- Two hashish-crazed fakirs from Bukhara killed five passengers and wounded six others aboard the Austrian steamer Impératrice before being beaten to death by the crew; an Ottoman emir was struck down at his prayers.
- Deputy Boulay de la Meurthe told the Chamber that 15,000 French schoolmasters earned under 200 francs a year — less than the 319 francs the State spends annually on each convict — yet his amendment for a pay rise was rejected.
- Colonel de l'Espinasse denounced historian Jules Michelet before the Chamber for allegedly calling Joan of Arc a madwoman; deputies shouted him down and voted closure, while M. Schutzenberger defended unrestricted historical inquiry.
- The deposed Emir Bashir Shihab II of Lebanon, aged over eighty and living in poverty at Constantinople, was arrested by ten kavasses and exiled to Safranbolu in Anatolia on orders of the Sublime Porte.
- Sultan Abdülmecid personally awarded diamond-studded decorations to the Greek patriarch, the Armenian patriarchs, and the Grand Rabbi of Constantinople during the eight-day wedding festivities of his sister Sultana Adile, whose banquet tent cost 600,000 francs.
- Philanthropist François Delessert told the Chamber that France had only 1,489 infant asylums serving fewer than 100,000 children, against a need for over 11,000 such institutions, and cited a working-class family saved from poverty when a nearby asylum freed the mother to earn wages.
- Dr Steiger, the imprisoned Lucerne official, escaped through a hole cut in his prison wall at night, was dressed in a huntsman's costume, and reached Zurich in seven and a quarter hours — greeted by cannon-fire and crowds across Switzerland.
- Two women in the Drôme — both former mistresses of a landowner named Perrot — were arrested after one ambushed him at his door and hurled a bottle of sulphuric acid in his face, permanently blinding him.