This Week in Literary History: France Throws Victor Hugo the World’s First Celebrity Funeral 

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France throws Victor Hugo the world’s first celebrity funeral 

Victor Hugo—France’s favorite son and most beloved poet—died on May 22, 1885 at the age of 83. Ten days later, his country threw him an elaborate funeral, the likes of which had never been seen before.

After all, it was Victor Hugo! “The relation of Victor Hugo to the literature of his country, as at once its primate and its patriarch, has not been held by any writer in Europe since the death of Goethe, and Goethe was by no means the popular hero in Germany that Hugo has for fifteen years been in France,” the funeral notice in the Times explained. He was beloved for both his politics and his art—by pretty much everyone, it seems, except perhaps the Catholic Church.

The night before the funeral, Hugo’s body—“enclosed in a triple coffin with photographs of his children and grandchildren, roses from Villequier and a bronze medallion stamped with the face of Vacquerie,” as Graham Robb described it in his 1997 biography of the author—was placed in a catafalque beneath the Arc de Triomphe, which had been draped in black, and was “guarded by torch-bearing horsemen and bathed in electric light.” Thousands of people—forty thousand, by some estimates—came to see the great artist lying in state; nearby, peddlers were doing “a roaring trade” in Hugo-based souvenirs (one, Robb writes, claiming to be Hugo’s body-servant, took home a tidy profit by selling 400 pairs of what were supposedly the writer’s old trousers). The wine flowed freely, the atmosphere like a rowdy carnival—appropriate for the celebration of a French hero who famously loved a good party. According to literary critic Edmond de Goncourt, who got it from a policeman, all of the brothels in the city had closed in tribute to their favorite customer—and their employees had “draped their pudenda in black crêpe as a mark of respect.” (This cannot be true, but is amazing nonetheless.)

“This extraordinary display of erotic energy and commercia verve—not the absurd procession of the following day—was Hugo’s true apotheosis,” Robb writes. “Something between a mythical regeneration and a moral disgrace. A great clanking platitude brought spectacularly to life.” According to urban legend, Paris experienced a “mini baby boom” nine months later. 

That absurd procession, for which the government had allocated a budget of 20,000 francs, started in earnest the next day at noon, with a twenty-one-gun salute. Between two and three million people joined the three regiments that escorted Hugo’s body from the Arc de Triomphe to its final resting place in the Panthéon. One-hundred-and-fifty pigeons were set free at the Pont de la Concorde. Nineteen “tediously uncontroversial speeches” were given. Several people were injured, and a few killed, in the crush of bodies and emotions. All this despite the fact that Hugo had requested a pauper’s funeral. 

“It is the boast of Republican Paris that the funeral pageant organized by the State in honor of Victor Hugo was the most magnificent that the world has ever seen,” wrote the Paris correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. “If magnificence is to be measured by the length of the procession, the number of deputations, and moving mountains of flowers, it probably was so. At any rate the assertion may be made without much fear of contradiction, because to find any parallel to Victor Hugo’s funeral we must go back to Pagan times.”

It is fitting, then, that Hugo’s grand adieu is remembered and celebrated in Paris to this very day.

On Victor Hugo’s Posthumous Career as a Religious Prophet

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“I am reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. A book which I remember of old, but I had a great longing to read it again. It is very beautiful, that figure of Monseigneur Myriel or Bienvenu I think sublime. . . . It is good to read such a book again, I think, just to keep some feelings alive. Especially love for humanity, and the faith in, and consciousness of, something higher, in short, quelque chose là-haut.”

In other (old)

news this week

29-year-old playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed (or is he?) in a tavern brawl (May 30, 1593) • Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) is published in Buenos Aires, sporting the first of many gorgeous covers (May 30, 1967) • Barbara Pym, “the most underrated writer of the 20th century,” is born (June 2, 1913) • Raymond Carver quits drinking (June 2, 1977) • “Casey at the Bat,” the most famous baseball poem in the English language, is published in The San Francisco Examiner (June 3, 1888) • Valerie Solanas, the author of SCUM Manifesto, attempts to assassinate Andy Warhol (June 3, 1968) • Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and owner of a very fine home library, is born (June 3, 1936) • Mark Twain, cocaine kingpin, receives an honorary doctorate of literature from the University of Missouri (June 4, 1902) • 22-year-old Carson McCullers’ first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is published (June 4, 1940) • The first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which would become the first nationally banned book in America, is published in the National Era abolitionist newspaper (June 5, 1851)

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HERE’S A RARE RECORDING OF RAYMOND CARVER READING ONE OF HIS BEST-KNOWN STORIES

“I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter—you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.”

–RAY BRADBURY

Died this week in 2012 (and left plenty of advice for writers)

“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call the ‘breaks.’ In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things—read and write—and wait.

–COUNTEE CULLEN

Born this week in 1903

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