XCVI. Le contrat
XCVI. The Marriage Contract
French forces confront Abd-el-Kader in western Algeria as Morocco-backed insurgents besiege frontier posts and the Irish famine deepens political tensions.
- General Lamoricière, with only 1,200 men, advanced against Abd-el-Kader's force of 8,000–10,000 fighters; united with Cavaignac at the col de Bab-Taza, the combined column of 3,000–3,500 men pushed into the Trara mountains on 12 October.
- Captain Brachet's garrison at Sebdou—besieged by 1,200–1,500 fighters after Commandant Billot was ambushed and killed—made a bayonet sortie, killing 50 enemies and capturing three flags at a cost of one Zouave dead.
- Haiti issued a decree forbidding marriage between Haitians and white persons, with violators and their descendants stripped of all rights of citizenship; a second decree expelled any mulatto who held citizenship rights elsewhere.
- Lord Brougham, in a letter to a French correspondent, warned that French opposition politicians who inflame anti-English sentiment to topple the ministry risk accidentally destroying the peace they themselves would inherit.
- The French whaling ship l'Angélina lost its captain, lieutenant, surgeon, and ten sailors to what appeared to be an ambush by islanders at the Mulgrave Islands; the vessel searched for eight days before sailing on to Hawaii without finding them.
- An escaped convict named Londel openly roamed the Norman countryside armed with a rifle, entered farmhouses to demand food, and was suspected of stealing 800 francs from his former master Pavid—yet no one dared detain him.
- The new Latin-French Dictionary by Quicherat and Daveluy, ten years in the making and published by Hachette, adds more than 1,500 words absent from any existing lexicon, drawing extensively on the Bible, Christian poets, and Latin grammarians.
- Professor Becquerel of the Académie des Sciences will begin his public course in applied physics at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle on Monday 27 October, continuing every Monday and Friday.