1868 in France

Incumbents

• Monarch - Napoleon III

Events

• March - Geologist Louis Lartet discovers the first identified skeletons of Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern humans, at Abri de Crô-Magnon, a rock shelter at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne.
• 18 August - The element later named as helium is first detected in the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere by astronomer Jules Janssen during a total eclipse in Guntur, India, but assumed to be sodium.
• October - The French military mission to Japan (1867–68) is ordered to leave by Imperial decree.
• Jules-Emile Planchon and colleagues propose Phylloxera as the cause of the Great French Wine Blight.
• Jean-Martin Charcot describes and names multiple sclerosis.
• Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron patents methods of color photography.
• Ernest and Auguste Bollée first patent the Éolienne Bollée wind turbine.

Arts and literature

• January - Émile Zola defends his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin, against charges of pornography and corruption of morals.
• Establishment of the Académie Julian, a major art school in Paris that admits women, by Rodolphe Julian.
• Aristide Cavaillé-Coll's organ at Notre-Dame de Paris is dedicated.

Sport

• The first documented bicycle race is generally held to be a 1,200 m race at the Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris.

Births

January to June

• 17 January - Louis Couturat, logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist
• 27 January - Jenny Sacerdote, under birth name Jeanne Adèle Bernard, famous Parisian dressmaker
• 3 March - Émile Chartier, philosopher, journalist and pacifist
• 1 April - Edmond Rostand, poet and playwright
• 28 April - Émile Bernard, painter
• 6 May - Gaston Leroux, journalist, detective and novelist
• 18 June - Georges Lacombe, sculptor and painter

July to December

• 27 July - Eugène Apert, pediatrician
• 28 July - André Spire, poet, writer, and Zionist activist
• 6 August - Paul Claudel, poet, dramatist and diplomat
• 11 August - Théodore Eugène César Ruyssen, historian of philosophy and pacifist
• 24 October - Alexandra David-Néel, explorer
• 19 November - Gustave-Auguste Ferrié, radio pioneer and army general
• 25 December - Eugenie Besserer, actress

Deaths

• 13 January - Arthur-Marie Le Hir, Biblical scholar and Orientalist
• 22 January - Étienne Serres, physician and embryologist
• 8 February - Jacques Camou, general
• 11 February - Léon Foucault, physicist
• 22 April - Jean-François Jarjavay, anatomist and surgeon
• 24 April - Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Roman Catholic nun
• 6 May - Louis Marie de la Haye, Vicomte de Cormenin, jurist and political pamphleteer
• 14 June - Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet, physicist
• 22 August - Jean-François Barrière, historian
• 28 August - Antoine Clot, physician
• 24 December - Adolphe d'Archiac, geologist and paleontologist
• December - Pierre Carmouche, playwright