The Funeral of Victor Hugo

When Victor Hugo died, forty thousand people spent the night on Paris streets waiting to see his casket as it moved from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon. On June 1, 1885, between two and three million people observed Hugo’s funeral procession—the first such reverence ever accorded a celebrity. Alfred Phillipe Roll’s painting offers a nighttime view of Hugo’s casket as it rests on a tall and ornately decorated platform beneath the Arc de Triomphe.