The toppling of the Vendôme Column on May 16, 1871, one of the defining acts of the Paris Commune, is the subject of this albumen silver cabinet card. A group of Communards led by the painter Gustave Courbet pulled down the column that day, and this photograph captures the square in the immediate aftermath. No photographer's imprint appears on the mount, though the subject places it within a documented body of Commune-era photography made by several French photographers working the site, among them Franck (François Gobinet de Villecholes) and Bruno Braquehais.

The pedestal stands intact at center, its bas-relief battle scenes spiraling up the shaft still legible on the surviving base, while the column shaft itself lies broken and partially visible at right, its curved bronze skin and stone drum sections collapsed onto the sandy ground. Mounds of excavated earth and lumber scraps frame the foreground, and a wooden shelter or guardhouse is visible at left. The classically articulated facades of the Place Vendôme ring the background in full detail.

The Vendôme Column was built by Napoleon I in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a glorification of the victorious French soldiers who defeated the Russian-Austrian alliance at the Battle of Austerlitz; the seventy-six battle-scene bas-reliefs that spiral up the shaft were cast from the bronze of 250 captured Russian cannons. Six days after the column was toppled, the Assemblée de Versailles decided to rebuild it, and barely two years later, in 1873, Marshal MacMahon had an identical copy reconstructed.

Inscribed in pencil on the reverse: "Place Vendôme" (Place Vendôme). Additional notations on the reverse read "89/10," "10/13/07," "AOCBOX," and "Eb."