Antoine Fauchery was a French adventurer, writer and photographer with republican sympathies. He participated in the national uprising in Poland in 1848, opened a photographic studio in Melbourne, Australia in 1858, and was commissioned to accompany the French forces as they progressed to Beijing during the last stage of the Second Opium War in 1860. He wrote thirteen long dispatches from the front-line for le Moniteur, the official French government newspaper. He died in Yokohama of dysentery.