The toppling of the Vendôme Column on May 16, 1871, one of the defining acts of the Paris Commune, is documented here in an albumen silver stereoview from the series "Désastres de la Guerre" (Disasters of War) by Paris photographer Jean Andrieu, whose initials "J.A." appear on the mount face. On May 16, 1871, Communards pulled down the Vendôme Column, a monument modeled on Trajan's Column in Rome, its bronze bas-relief panels made from captured cannon, with a statue of Napoleon in classical dress at its top. Andrieu reached the square shortly after the fall and recorded the wreckage with the kind of direct, on-the-ground authority that places his series among the most significant photographic documents of the Commune.

The view looks across the cobbled expanse of the Place Vendôme toward the colonnaded facades of the surrounding hôtels particuliers. In the middle distance, enormous bronze drum sections and torn bronze sheeting from the column lie tumbled across the square in a wide field of debris. A horse-drawn vehicle appears at the left edge of the rubble field, and several figures stand among the wreckage. Foregrounded in the left half of each frame, a cannon wheel and limber sit beside a tall cast-iron street lamp, their silhouettes framing the scene with an unmistakable military counterpoint.

Gustave Courbet, president of the Commune's Art Commission, had called the column "a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate the ideas of war and conquest." The Third Republic ordered its restoration and placed the cost upon Courbet, unjustly accused of having ordered its destruction, and by 1873 an identical copy had been reconstructed.

The salmon-orange mount face bears the printed series title "Désastres de la Guerre" ("Disasters of War") above the catalog line "3097. Colonne Vendôme abattue le 16 mai 1871, J.A." (no. 3097, Vendôme Column felled on May 16, 1871, by J.A.). The reverse is plain with no printed imprint; pencil notations in a later hand read "4/01/07" and "Lohiez."