Joséphine Marchais, born Joséphine Rabier, was a day laborer who served as a cantinière with the Enfants Perdus battalion during the Paris Commune. This photograph was taken by Ernest Appert, with other surviving prints of the same image, including one held by the Musée Carnavalet, inscribed on the reverse “Josephine Marchais, cantinière.” The copy offered here is inscribed instead “Retiffe,” almost certainly a period mix-up between Marchais and her co-defendant Élisabeth Rétiffe, with whom she was tried.

She is shown seated, half length, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair is parted and drawn back smoothly from her face, and she wears a dark, high-collared jacket closed with large buttons over a lighter blouse visible at the throat, her expression calm and faintly smiling toward the camera.

Witnesses placed Marchais on the barricade at the Rue de Lille on May 22 and 23, 1871, armed with a rifle and wearing a Tyrolean hat, and testified that she forced her lover to join the fighting there. Arrested while carrying weapons and red scarves alongside Élisabeth Rétiffe, Eulalie Papavoine, and Léontine Suétens, she was condemned to death by court-martial in September 1871; her sentence was commuted on November 27, 1871, to forced labor for life, and she was deported to the penal colony in French Guiana, where she died in 1874.

The reverse of this copy is inscribed in pencil, “Retiffe,” over the printed studio imprint of E. Appert, Peintre Photographe, 24 Rue Taitbout, Paris. Given the matching Carnavalet print’s contemporary inscription naming Marchais, the sitter is identified here as Marchais rather than Rétiffe, notwithstanding the inscription on this particular card.