It was as an anarchist that he became a literary critic and journalist (his articles were later published in several collections). During the Trial of the thirty in 1894, he defended the anarchists Jean Grave and Félix Fénéon (also a painter). He then covered the 1895 miners' revolt in Carmaux for the "Écho de Paris". In 1896 he attended the Socialist Congress in London, where he denounced Karl Marx as "a jealous authoritarian, unfaithful to his own ideas, driving the "Internationale" away from its goals".