This bronze medal was made by Fèlix Rasumny in France, in about 1914-1920. This medal represents Marshal Joffre and a female figure symbolising the French Republic. Rasmny adheres to the medallic tradition, employed since the Renaissance, of using allegory to lend authority to visual propaganda. The most readily available source, intelligible to a contemporary French public, was that of Marianne, national symbol of the Republican spirit of liberty, glory and victory, whose pictorial vocabulary developed during the decade after the French Revolution of 1789. Her iconography encompassed the idealised republics of the ancient world, frequently expressed by wearing victor's laurel crowns and chitons of flying drapery.

Rasumny depicts the Phrygian cap or pilleus of classical antiquity, signifying the freed slave. The cap was transformed into the bonnet rouge, again a popular symbol of the Revolution. It appear that the imagery of this medal is derived from the common source, the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, for which françois Rude designed and executed the relief The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 in stone, 1833-6.