Victor Hugo publishes his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the hunchback, Quasimodo, is obsessed with Esmeralda

Napoleon's son, known now as the Duke of Reichstadt, dies of tuberculosis in Vienna

English author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay

Hector Berlioz marries an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, with whom he has been obsessed since seeing her play Ophelia and Juliet in 1827

French zoologist Félix Dujardin identifies protoplasm, the viscous translucent substance common to all forms of life

French author Honoré de Balzac publishes Le Père Goriot, one of the key novels that he later includes in La Comédie Humaine

Alexis de Tocqueville publishes in French the first two volumes of his extremely influential study Democracy in America

Hector Berlioz's requiem mass, the Grande messe des morts, has its first performance in Paris

The French painter Gustave Courbet moves from his native town of Ornans to Paris

Strawberry Hill passes through the Waldegrave family to John, who marries Frances Braham in 1839, and on his early death to his brother George, the seventh Earl, who marries his brother's widow.

Napoleon's remains are brought to Paris for burial in Les Invalides, as the Napoleonic legend grows

Honoré de Balzac begins publication of a collected edition of his fiction under the title La Comédie Humaine

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meet in Paris and become life-long friends

Louis Philippe, now King of France, visits Orleans House during a royal visit to Britain.

The self-contained metal cartridge, with a percussion cap in its base, is patented by a Paris gunsmith named Houiller

Frances, Lady Waldegrave, inherits Strawberry Hill on her husband's death in 1846, marries George Granville Harcourt, an elderly Liberal MP, and establishes herself as a leading Liberal hostess.

The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, is published in Paris with the ringing slogan: 'Workers of the world, unite!'

A revolution in Paris in February removes Louis-Philippe and introduces France's second republic

Honoré de Balzac completes publication of La Comédie Humaine, a 17-volume collected edition of his numerous novels and stories

Louis Napoleon is elected the first president of France's new Second Republic

French physicist Léon Foucault demonstrates the rotation of the earth by means of a long pendulum suspended in the Pantheon in Paris

The president of France, Louis Napoleon, stages a coup d'état, rounding up his political opponents during a long December night

France demands that Turkey should end Russia's exclusive control of the Christian Holy Places in the Ottoman empire

Louis Napoleon, asking the French people to approve his elevation to emperor as Napoleon III, receives a resounding yes in the plebiscite

France and Britain despatch their fleets to the Dardanelles, in readiness to go through the Straits to the Black Sea