During the early hours of 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries sustained earlier that night in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France.

In 1999, a French investigation found that Paul lost control of the vehicle at high speed while intoxicated by alcohol and under the effects of prescription drugs, and concluded that he was solely responsible for the crash.

He was the deputy head of security at the Hôtel Ritz Paris at the time of the crash and had earlier goaded paparazzi waiting for Diana and Fayed outside the hotel.

[4] In 2008, a jury at the British inquest, Operation Paget, returned a verdict of unlawful killing through grossly negligent driving by Paul and the following paparazzi vehicles.

[17][18] They had stopped there en route to London, having spent the preceding nine days together on board Mohamed's yacht Jonikal on the French and Italian Riviera.

Mohamed was the owner of the Hôtel Ritz Paris and resided in an apartment on Rue Arsène Houssaye, a short distance from the hotel, just off the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

[53] They departed from Vélizy – Villacoublay Air Base and landed at RAF Northolt, and a bearer party from the Queen's Colour Squadron transferred her coffin to the hearse.

[68] Diana's death was met with extraordinary public expressions of grief,[69][8] and her funeral at Westminster Abbey on 6 September drew an estimated 3 million mourners and onlookers in London.

[70][71] Outside the Abbey and in Hyde Park crowds watched and listened to proceedings on large outdoor screens and speakers as guests filed in, including representatives of the many charities of which Diana was patron.

[79] Mourners cast flowers at the funeral procession for almost the entire length of its journey and vehicles even stopped on the opposite carriageway of the M1 motorway as the cars passed.

[87] On Sunday morning after Diana's death, the Queen, Prince Charles, William and Harry all wore black to church services at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral Castle.

[88] The royal family later issued a statement, saying Charles, William and Harry were "taking strength from" and "deeply touched" by and "enormously grateful" for the public support.

[91] On their way from Crathie Kirk to Balmoral, the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles, William and Harry viewed the floral tributes and messages left by the public.

[90] The Queen and the rest of the Royal Family were criticised for a rigid adherence to protocol, and their efforts to protect the privacy of Diana's grieving sons were interpreted as a lack of compassion.

[28] Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General said that her death "has robbed the world of a consistent and committed voice for the improvement of the lives of suffering children worldwide".

[88] In a telegram of condolences, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed the view that Diana had also become the victim of an "increasingly brutal and unscrupulous competition on the part of some of the media.

[121] In San Francisco, around 14,000 people marched through the city in a procession on 5 September to pay tribute to Diana, honouring her for her work on behalf of AIDS patients.

[127] Jonathan Sacks led prayers by the Jewish community at the Western Marble Arch Synagogue, and Cardinal Basil Hume presided over the Roman Catholic requiem mass held at Westminster Cathedral.

During the four weeks following her funeral, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17% and cases of deliberate self-harm by 44.3% compared with the average for that period in the four previous years.

[129] In the weeks after her death counselling services reported an increase in the number of phone calls by the people who were seeking help due to grief or distress.

As early as 1998, philosopher Anthony O'Hear identified the mourning as a defining point in the "sentimentalisation of Britain", a media-fuelled phenomenon where image and reality become blurred.

[138] These criticisms were repeated on the tenth anniversary of the crash, when journalist Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian expressed the opinion that, "It has become an embarrassing memory, like a mawkish, self-pitying teenage entry in a diary ... we cringe to think about it.

[142] Hitchens's views were later supported by Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, who also questioned the reason behind the "outburst of mass hysteria" following Diana's death and described it as "an episode when the British public lost its characteristic cool and engaged in seven days of bogus sentimentality, whipped up by the media, and whose flimsiness was demonstrated when it vanished as quickly as it had appeared".

Sociologist Deborah Steinberg pointed out that many Britons associated Diana not with the Royal Family but with social change and a more liberal society: "I don't think it was hysteria, the loss of a public figure can be a touchstone for other issues.

[145] Reflecting back on the event in the 2021 Apple TV+ docuseries The Me You Can't See, Diana's son Prince Harry said that he was surprised by the extent to which the public reacted to his mother's death.

[149] Following her death, a member of the Millennium Dome's board suggested the project be refashioned and extended "to accommodate, for example, a hospital, businesses, charities, private residences, and the whole thing named 'the Princess Diana Centre'".

[164] The BBC reported that Mohamed Al-Fayed, having earlier reiterated his claim that his son and Diana were murdered by the Royal Family, immediately criticised the opening statement as biased.

[167] The jury decided on 7 April 2008 that Diana had been unlawfully killed by the "grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles [the paparazzi] and of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul".

[181] On 7 April 2008, Lord Justice Baker's inquest into the deaths of Diana and Fayed ended with the jury concluding that they were the victims of an "unlawful killing" by Henri Paul and the drivers of the following vehicles.

[187] Diana was ranked third in the 2002 Great Britons poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the British public, after Sir Winston Churchill (1st) (a distant cousin), and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (2nd), just above Charles Darwin (4th), William Shakespeare (5th), and Isaac Newton (6th).