LXXXII. L'effraction
LXXXII. Breaking and Entering
The trial of the 'Endormeurs' criminal band, the potato blight spreading across Europe, and slave trafficking in Tripoli dominate this issue.
- Sixteen accused members of the 'Endormeurs' gang — most aged 19 to 25 — appeared before the Seine Assizes on ten counts including drugging victims, serial burglaries, and a prison death caused by a kick to the skull.
- A condemned Barcelona stage-coach robber, granted a last-minute stay of execution, named 40 accomplices hidden across the city, including a goldsmith who had concealed stolen jewellery inside a flower-vase.
- The governor of Tripoli, Sidi-Seïd — once a wandering bazaar crier — now owns 120 slaves purchased from a single caravan and ships them to Constantinople, with Turkish authorities conducting the trade on their own account.
- A Swedish officer, Captain Fleetwood, demonstrated a compressed-air weapon firing 100 bullets per minute from a 2,000-round reservoir, lighter than a standard musket and capable of penetrating oak beams at 150 feet.
- The Norwegian Storting voted 16,500 francs to send two jurists to France, Belgium, and England to study the practical effects of trial by jury, with their findings to be reported at the next parliamentary session.
- French botanist Philippar disputes Professor Morren's fungal theory of the potato blight, arguing the Botrytis parasite is merely a surface effect while the true disease destroys internal cellular tissue and renders tubers fetid and unpreservable.
- The Duc d'Aumale hosted 1,800 guests at a nine-hour ball at his Château de Belfort near Bordeaux, beginning as a daytime fête to spare ladies a night journey and continuing until 11 p.m. after the Duchesse de Nemours departed at six.
- Marc Girardin ('Saint-Marc Girardin'), a Journal des Débats contributor for twenty years, published two volumes of Essais de Littérature et de Morale with Charpentier, gathering Sorbonne lectures and his Académie française prize essay on Bossuet.