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 cabinet card by Parisian photographer Ernest Ladrey. The image captures Place Vendôme in the immediate aftermath of the column's fall, its bronze spiraling shaft lying in massive broken sections across the square while crowds of onlookers press in from all sides. Ladrey, active from 1860 to 1889, maintained his studio at the Passage des Princes between the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue de Richelieu, and the Commune's destruction of Parisian monuments was among the topical subjects he documented.

The foreground is dominated by enormous fractured bronze drum segments and scattered stone rubble filling the center of the square, with dozens of figures in dark civilian dress lining both the left and right edges of the debris field. The column's stone base remains standing at right, its summit bare and truncated, while the grand Haussmann-era facades of the Place Vendôme stretch across the entire background, their mansard rooftops and arched ground-floor arcades intact and undisturbed. Several striped awnings hang from upper-floor windows of the buildings behind.

The Vendôme Column was erected in 1810 by Napoleon I to celebrate his army's victory at Austerlitz, and its 425 bronze bas-relief panels spiraling up the shaft were cast from captured cannon. Within six days of the column's toppling, the Versailles Assembly voted to rebuild it, and by 1873 an identical copy had been reconstructed, making photographs taken in the brief window of its destruction among the most historically significant records of the Commune.

Inscribed in ink on the reverse: "Colonne Vendôme" ("Vendôme Column"). The reverse bears the printed imprint of Ernest Ladrey, Passage des Princes, Escalier E, Boulevard des Italiens 5bis and Rue Richelieu, 97, Paris, with awards noted from the Exposition Universelle and the Exposition de Beauvais; also inscribed in pencil on the reverse: "LOBCEZ" and "3/24/14."