Les Feuilles d’automne , or the peregrinations of a forgotten statue of Victor Hugo

Abstract

This article investigates a statue of Victor Hugo that has been largely forgotten, but that enjoyed a certain degree of fame in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the work of Frédéric-Louis-Désiré Bogino (1831–99), a little-known artist who produced this monument at the end of his career. Although the plaster statue was first unveiled at the 1884 Salon des artistes français, it became an ephemeral memorial after Hugo’s death in May 1885 when it was exhibited on the route of his funeral procession. Through unpublished documents, rare photographs and numerous testimonies, this article reintegrates Bogino’s now disappeared statue into Victor Hugo’s iconography, and repositions it in the context of the slow gestation of commemorative monuments dedicated to the famed French writer.