The Vendome Column and the broad sweep of the Rue Castiglione are captured in this albumen-print stereoview from a series titled "Paris instantane" (Paris instant views), issued in the 1860s by Hippolyte Jouvin, a French photographer and publisher who pioneered fast-exposure stereoscopic street photography. Jouvin published a series of over two hundred stereoscopic photographs under the title "Vues instantanees de Paris," with the word "instant" referring to the rapid exposure time that allowed moving figures in the streets to be arrested clearly. The elevated vantage point, shot from well above street level and looking down the length of the Rue Castiglione, pulls the towering column deep into the middle distance while the Haussmann-era facades of the Place Vendome recede in sharp perspective on the left.

Horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians, and delivery vehicles animate the cobblestone street below, all frozen mid-motion by the fast collodion exposure. The surrounding buildings show continuous mansard rooflines studded with chimneys, tall shuttered windows, and ground-floor arcaded passages. The column itself rises above the roofline against an open sky, its spiral relief visible even at this distance, crowned by the figure of Napoleon. Handwritten script reading "Paris" appears in ink on the left border of the yellow card mount.

The Vendome 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, with seventy-six battle-scene bas-reliefs cast from the bronze of 250 captured Russian cannons spiraling up the shaft. Louis-Philippe crowned the column with a statue of Napoleon in 1833, and Napoleon III replaced it thirty years later with another depicting Napoleon in Roman costume. The column's intact presence here, atop a fully populated street, firmly dates the image to before the Commune's destruction of the monument in May 1871.

The reverse bears a printed label in a ruled border reading "No. 1 Paris instantane / Colonne Vendome / et Rue Castiglione" (No. 1 Paris instant views / Vendome Column / and Rue Castiglione), with the handwritten notations "6/05/11," "LOBACI," and "Eb" in ink below. Additional handwriting in script on the right edge reads "Paris."