A bust-length portrait of Eugène Vermersch, the French poet, pamphleteer, and radical journalist born in Lille in 1845, rendered as an albumen silver carte-de-visite by the Paris studio of Thiébault, operating under the succession imprint of Bacard fils, active at 31 Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle from 1868 onward. Vermersch was a socialist polemicist and a central figure of the Paris Commune of 1871, co-founding the incendiary newspaper Le Père Duchêne alongside Maxime Vuillaume and Alphonse Humbert. The Bacard fils imprint, which appeared after Paul Bacard married Désirée Thiébault, daughter of studio founder Eugène Thiébault, and moved into the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle premises, signing photographs under the Thiébault name as successor, dates this print to approximately 1868–1878.

The subject is shown in a three-quarter bust pose, gazing slightly upward and to his left with a composed, serious expression. His thick walrus mustache, full face, and notably disheveled, swept-back fair hair are immediately distinctive. He wears a dark cravat tied loosely at the throat over a white shirt and a pale, wide-lapeled coat, all consistent with Parisian intellectual fashion of the late Second Empire or early Commune period.

Vermersch (1845–1878) was repeatedly condemned by French courts for his inflammatory articles before co-founding Le Père Duchêne, and after the Bloody Week he fled to Belgium and the Netherlands before settling in London, where he founded the journal Qui vive. Suffering from increasingly severe episodes of paranoid dementia, worsened by poverty, he was placed in a London asylum, where he died on 9 October 1878.

The reverse bears the printed studio imprint in vertical orientation: "PHOTOGRAPHIE THIÉBAULT / 31 Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, 31 / en face le Théâtre du Gymnase / BACARD FILS / GENDRE & SUCCESSEUR" ("Photography Thiébault / 31 Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, 31 / opposite the Théâtre du Gymnase / Bacard fils / Son-in-law and Successor"), with a cursive ink inscription below reading "Vermersch."