20 Dollars Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo died in 1885, and the French state gave him a funeral so outsized it briefly became a political crisis — his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, a honor previously reserved for military commanders, while an estimated two million people lined the streets of Paris. Liberia's connection to all of this is essentially nonexistent, which places this coin squarely in the late-1990s and early-2000s wave of Pacific and African nation collector issues produced for the European commemorative market rather than domestic circulation.