16 May – Two weeks after police in Paris arrest six teenagers for gambling in the suburb of Saint-Laurent, rioting breaks out when a rumor spreads that plainclothes policemen are hauling off small children between the ages of five and ten years old, in order to provide blood to an ailing aristocrat.[2] Over the next two weeks, rioting breaks out in other sections of the city. Police are attacked, including one who is beaten to death by the mob, until order is restored and police reforms are announced.[3]
20 August – French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, by way of the Foreign Minister, the Marquis de Puisieulx and Netherlands ambassador to ParisMattheus Lestevenon, sends a letter that ultimately persuades the States-General of the Dutch Republic to allow and partially finance Lacaille's stellar trigonometry mission to the Cape of Good Hope. The expedition departs Lorient on 21 October.[4][5]
^Evans, Hilary; Bartholomew, Robert E., eds. (2009). "Child Abduction Panic". Outbreak!: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior. Anomalist Books. pp. 83–84.
^Martin, Henri (1866). The Decline of the French Monarchy. Walker, Fuller and Company. p. 395.
^Glass, Ian S. (2013). Nicolas-Louis De La Caille, Astronomer and Geodesist. Oxford University Press. pp. 30–33.
^Maclear, Thomas (1838). Verification and Extension of La Caille's Arc of Meridian at the Cape of Good Hope. Mowry and Barclay. p. 58.
^Emile-Male, Gilberte (2004). "The First Transfer at the Louvre in 1750: Andrea del Sarto's La Charite". Issues in the Conservation of Paintings. Getty Publications. p. 278.
