Left: Edouard Manet, Woman with Parrot, 1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Right: rue Gregoire de Tours, 6th arrondissement, 1866. This quarter survived Haussmann. Charles Marville is the photographer, and the book, Le Nouveau Paris is edited by Philippe Mellot.

This year horse meat makes it appearance in alimentations (food stores). By 1872 there are 150 horse meat butchers in France. (Horse meat is still available today. Butchers have the sign of a horse head advertising its presence. There are also specialty butchers who have stands on the bi-weekly markets throughout the city.) (AF)

Offenbach's La Vie Parisien opens to acclaim at the theatre du Palais-Royal.

Manet's Le Fifre was refused by the Salon.  From Webmuseum-Paris "Except among the few, this picture shared the unpopularity that previous works by Manet had suffered and was refused at the Salon of 1866. The refusal brought Emile Zola to the artist's defense in L'Evènement but Zola's assertion that he was `so convinced that M. Manet would be one of the masters of tomorrow that he would think it a good stroke of business, if he had money enough, to buy all its canvases now' infuriated the readers, and their anger caused the editor to dispense with Zola's services as critic. The novelist returned to the attack elsewhere with a longer eulogy. His description of the fifer as `le petit bonhomme' who `puffs away with all his heart and soul' was a literary approach but his polemics served to keep the issue of aesthetic freedom a living force for the younger generation."

Victor Hugo writes Les Travailleurs de la mer.  He finds it a struggle to make a living as a writer. On the bright side, he meets Manet.

More broadly:

France demands the right bank of the Rhine as the price of neutrality in the Prussian-Austrian War. Antagonism to Germany is back in France. (CHF)

Monet paints Femmes au Jardin, Corot paints L'Eglise de Marissel, Pissarro paints Les Bords de la Marne. (CHF)