We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.

Along with Christiaan Cornelissen he cited as example US trade-unions where trade-unions composed of skilled qualified workers sometimes opposed themselves to un-skilled workers in order to defend their relatively privileged position. Here he befriended Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin helping the latter to produce La Révolte. He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of Mikhail Bakunin.

He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of Mikhail Bakunin. He was an enormously popular figure in his time. He was an insurrectionary anarchist[citation needed] early in his life.