Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863, Musee d'Orsay. This is one of the 2800 canvases rejected by the the Academy des Arts which controls the official Salon and is dominant in influencing French artistic tastes. There is a substantial outcry which led Napoleon III to intervene and ask for a reconsideration of rejected works. When the Academy refused reconsideration, Napoleon orders a separate exhibition for the rejected works. Painters represented in the Salon des Refuses include Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Armand Guillaumin, Johan Jongkind,  James Whistler, and Edouard Manet.

This year is the first Grand Prix de Paris, with a 100,000 franc purse.

The Petit Journal is founded by Moise-Polydore Millaud and has a run until 1944. (CHF)

Food is dear to the Parisian hearts, and access is made easier this year by an elimination of restrictions on the number of Boulangeries. The number more than doubled, from 601 now to 1400 in 1874. (AF)

Alexander Bourjour founds a perfume factory in Paris. (AF)

The Greek statue Victory of Samothrace enters the Louvre collection. (CHF)

Les Halles, with its iron architecture, is completed. This central food market will move to the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s and be replaced by the Pompidou Center.

More broadly:

> Boudin paints La Plage a Trouville. Oil on canvas, 26 1/2 x 41 in (67.3 x 104.1 cm), Minneapolis Institute of Arts

> Phylloxera, a devastating disease that attacks wine grape vines, arrives in France. The disease has it origins in the US, and after it has run its course, most of the vines in France will be replanted with American stock. (AF)

> The words 'aviator' and 'aviation' enter the language, courtesy of Gabriel de La Landelle (AF)

> Jules Verne writes 'Five Weeks in a Balloon' ('Cinq semaines en ballon')

> London gets the world's first metro. Paris lags long behind on this.