Victor Hugo

Hugo wrote "Notre-Dame de Paris" and "Les Misérables", campaigned against the death penalty and for the poor, and spent nineteen years in exile on Guernsey rather than accept the rule of Napoleon III.

He asked in his will for a pauper's hearse. Two million people lined the route of his funeral anyway — more than the population of Paris at the time — and he was carried to the Panthéon.