Victor Hugo led France's Romantic revolt against classical rules, producing the drama Hernani, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and Les Misérables — the vast novel that set Inspector Javert against the fugitive Jean Valjean and became his century's defining plea for mercy. He campaigned against the death penalty, and when Louis-Napoleon seized power in 1851, spent nineteen years in exile on Guernsey rather than submit. By the time he died in 1885, France buried him in the Panthéon; a crowd often estimated at a million people followed the coffin.
When Victor Hugo died in 1885, the city of Paris draped his coffin under the Arc de Triomphe and a crowd often estimated at a million people followed it through the streets to the Panthéon. Few writers anywhere had ever received so royal a national funeral. He had earned it twice over: once as the towering poet and novelist who gave France The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, and once as the public conscience who fought the death penalty, defended the poor, and went into nineteen years of exile rather than live under an emperor he despised. He was also a colossal egotist who carefully built his own legend, dabbled in séances, and never doubted that he was the soul of his age. The funeral proved he was at least partly right. France was burying not just a writer but the voice it had given itself.