Eugène Vermersch, born in Lille on August 13, 1845, and died in London on October 9, 1878, was a French socialist pamphleteer and polemicist, and a prominent figure of the Paris Commune. This carte-de-visite portrait was made by E. Gatel, photographe éditeur, operating at 173, Galerie de Valois in the Palais-Royal, Paris, and likely dates to around 1870 or earlier, preceding the suppression of the Commune in May 1871.

The oval-vignette bust portrait shows a young man with a full, tousled mane of dark hair, a prominent mustache, and an intense, sidelong gaze directed away from the lens. He wears a heavy, broad-lapeled overcoat over a buttoned waistcoat, with a loosely knotted polka-dot cravat tied at an artful, bohemian angle beneath a white shirt collar. The mount carries a purple-ruled border frame on cream stock.

Vermersch directed the satirical journal Le Hanneton in 1868, contributed to La Marseillaise in 1870, and then to Le Cri du Peuple in 1871. He co-founded, with Maxime Vuillaume and Alphonse Humbert, Le Père Duchêne, reviving the name of Hébert's journal of the Revolution. After the Semaine sanglante, he fled to Belgium and the Netherlands before settling in London, where he founded the journal Qui Vive.

The reverse bears the purple-printed imprint of E. Gatel, "Photographe Éditeur, Breveté s.g.d.g., Prédécesseur and Successeur de E. Bondonneau, Galerie de Valois, 173, Palais Royal, Paris" (Licensed publisher-photographer, predecessor and successor to E. Bondonneau), accompanied by a sailing-ship vignette beneath the motto "Fluctuat Nec Mergitur" (She is tossed by the waves but does not sink). The reverse is inscribed in pencil at top: "Eugene Vermersch (1845–1878)," and in a second hand below: "Revolutionary journalist, Satirist and writer, Paris Commune," with catalog notations "3/21/07," "LOGHZ2," and "Eb."