1582The day after the fourth of October was the fifteenth
In the Catholic countries of Europe, 15 October 1582 was the day that followed 4 October 1582. Ten dates in between simply did not exist. The papal bull Inter gravissimas, issued in February that year, had ordered them struck out to drag the spring equinox back to 21 March, where the Church’s calculation of Easter assumed it would be.
The problem was arithmetic. Julius Caesar’s calendar made the year about eleven minutes too long, which sounds harmless and adds up to roughly a day every 314 years. Over sixteen centuries it had pushed the equinox ten days out of place. The new scheme kept leap years but dropped three of them every four hundred years, and October was chosen because nothing important in the Church’s year would be lost. Protestant and Orthodox states refused to take instruction from Rome, so Europe kept two calendars for centuries; Britain and its colonies did not change until 1752.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Gregorian calendar ↗
1815Napoleon arrives at the end of the world
Nine weeks after leaving British waters aboard HMS Northumberland, Napoleon Bonaparte reached St Helena on 15 October 1815. The island is a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic, roughly 1,900 kilometres from the nearest mainland, and it had been chosen precisely because nobody had ever escaped from it.
He had surrendered to the Royal Navy in July, after Waterloo, apparently expecting a country retirement in England. Instead he got a small household of followers - the Bertrands, the Montholons, General Gourgaud, the chamberlain Las Cases - and a damp former farmhouse called Longwood, which was not ready for him until December. He dictated his memoirs there, quarrelled with the governor and died in May 1821, aged 51.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Fondation Napoléon: from Waterloo to the island of St Helena ↗
1894The arrest that split France
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer on the French general staff and an Alsatian Jew, was arrested on 15 October 1894 and accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy. The evidence was a torn-up memorandum found in a waste-paper basket and a handwriting comparison that several experts rejected. He was convicted in December, publicly stripped of his rank and sent to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana.
The case did not close. Another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was shown to have written the memorandum and was acquitted anyway; Émile Zola’s open letter ‘J’accuse’ in 1898 turned the matter into a national quarrel about the army, the Church, the republic and antisemitism. Dreyfus was tried again, pardoned, and finally cleared in 1906. He rejoined the army and served in the First World War.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Alfred Dreyfus and the Dreyfus affair ↗
1917Mata Hari is shot at Vincennes
At dawn on 15 October 1917 a French firing squad shot Margaretha Zelle, a 41-year-old Dutchwoman who had made a career in Paris as the dancer Mata Hari. A military court had convicted her of spying for Germany in a two-day trial that July. She was arrested in February; the war was going badly, and France was looking for someone to blame.
What she actually did remains disputed. She had taken German money, and she had offered her services to the French; the German government publicly cleared her in 1930, and the files released by France in 2017 persuaded many historians that the case against her was thin. The legend of the exotic dancer-spy, which owes more to newspapers and films than to evidence, has outlasted almost everything that can be proved about her.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Mata Hari ↗
1987The killing of Thomas Sankara
Thomas Sankara was 37 and had governed Upper Volta for four years, long enough to rename it Burkina Faso - ‘land of upright people’ - vaccinate millions of children, plant trees against the advancing desert, ban forced marriage and sell off the government’s Mercedes fleet. On 15 October 1987 he was shot dead in a coup led by Blaise Compaoré, who had been his closest colleague.
Compaoré governed for twenty-seven years and left only when the streets forced him out in 2014. The killing was not properly investigated until then. In 2022 a military court in Ouagadougou convicted Compaoré, tried in his absence, of complicity in Sankara’s murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Thomas Sankara ↗
