[Member of the Paris Commune: Laure, cantinière, à perpétuité]

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."