1858 in France

Incumbents

• Monarch - Napoleon III

  Events

• 14 January - Orsini affair: Felice Orsini and his accomplices fail to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris but their Orsini bombs kill 156 bystanders. Orsini is executed on 13 March by guillotine.
• 11 February - Lourdes apparitions: Peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, 14, has a vision at the grotto of Massabielle, the first in a series of eighteen events which will come to be regarded as Marian apparitions.
• August - The first aerial photography is carried out by Nadar, from a tethered balloon.
• September - Cochinchina Campaign: French warships, under Charles Rigault de Genouilly, attack and occupy Da Nang, Vietnam.

  Arts and literature

• 21 October - Following the lifting of government licensing restrictions on the number of performers, Jacques Offenbach's first 2-act opéra bouffe, Orpheus in the Underworld , is premiered at Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens.
• Camille Saint-Saëns succeeds Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély as organist of La Madeleine, Paris.

  Births

• 6 January - Sébastien Faure, anarchist,
• 9 January - Maurice Couette, physicist
• 21 January - Mélanie Bonis, composer
• 31 January - André Antoine, actor-manager
• 7 February - Amédée-François Lamy, military officer
• 15 April - Émile Durkheim, sociologist
• 19 May - Roland Bonaparte, prince, president of the Société de Géographie
• 28 August - Charles le Bargy, actor and film director
• August - Guy d'Hardelot, composer, pianist and teacher

  Deaths

• 15 January - Antoine Maurice Apollinaire d'Argout, statesman, minister and governor of the Bank of France
• 8 February - Ambroise Roux-Alphéran, historian
• 27 March - Jean Guillaume Audinet-Serville, entomologist
• 9 April - Auguste François Chomel, pathologist
• 3 May - Julien Auguste Pélage Brizeux, poet
• 21 May - Charles-Louis Havas, writer and founder of Agence France-Presse
• 10 July - Auguste de Montferrand, architect
• 5 August - Joseph-Marie, comte Portalis, diplomat and statesman
• 3 December - Joseph Marie Elisabeth Durocher, geologist
• 10 December - Joseph Paul Gaimard, naturalist