The Vendôme Column was a monument erected by Napoleon I in Place Vendôme, Paris, and on May 16, 1871, Communards pulled it down. This cabinet card, published by the Ancienne Maison Martinet at 172 rue de Rivoli, Paris, documents the scene in the immediate aftermath, with the card number 136 printed in the lower left of the image. The mount carries a red double-rule border and the publisher's imprint lettered in red below the image.

The foreground is filled with the toppled column's shattered bronze and stone fragments, spread in a broad field of rubble across the cobblestones of Place Vendôme. The truncated stone pedestal remains standing at center right, its upper section draped with a rope or chain. A small wooden shed sits at the base, and the Haussmann-era facades of the surrounding buildings of Place Vendôme extend across the full background, their mansard roofs, arched ground-floor arcades, and rows of shuttered windows rendered in sharp detail.

The column was modeled on Trajan's Column in Rome, with 425 bronze bas-relief panels spiraling up it, cast from captured cannon, and its destruction was one of the defining political acts of the Paris Commune. Six days after the column was toppled, the Assemblée de Versailles decided to rebuild it, and by 1873 Marshal MacMahon had an identical copy reconstructed.

The reverse is inscribed in pencil: "Column overthrown 1871 / Re-set in 1875 by McMahon" (the restoration date given on the reverse differs slightly from the documented 1873–1875 reerection timeline). Additional pencil notations read "10/10/07," "DOEFK1," and "Ep," with "178" written in the lower right corner.