Christiaan Gerardus Cornelissen was born on 30 August 1864, in the Dutch city of
's-Hertogenbosch, the second son of the carpenter Johannes Cornelissen and Mechelina van Wijk. He was educated at the in his home town. By the time he finished school, Cornelissen had renounced his native religion of
Catholicism and taught himself how to speak the
Latin and
English languages. He then went into teaching, working at schools in
Reek,
Geertruidenberg and
Middelburg. In the latter city, he joined a
political club that agitated for
universal suffrage, and began editing its newspaper
Licht en Waarheid, publishing its first issue in May 1899. He also became involved in
trade unionism and his reading of
Karl Marx attracted him to
classical economics and the theories of
socialism. He subsequently joined the
Social Democratic League (SDB), becoming a member of its central council and co-editing its newspaper
Recht voor Allen along with
Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, together with whom he led the organisation's anti-parliamentary faction. By 1891, Cornelissen was already advocating for
syndicalism and began calling on
revolutionary socialists and
social anarchists to form a
united front based on a shared anti-parliamentary viewpoint. He attended the congresses of the
Second International at
Brussels (1891),
Zürich (1893) and
London (1896) as a delegate of the SDB. He pursued the resolutions of the Brussels congress to establish a national trade union centre in the Netherlands, which culminated in the formation of the
National Labor Secretariat (NAS) in 1893. In 1897, Cornelissen and Domela Nieuwenhuis left the SDB; they moved to France the following year. In October 1899, Cornelissen married Elisabeth Katharina Frederike Rupertus, with whom he had a son. In France, Cornelissen focused on his work in
journalism and
economics, largely falling out of contact with the Dutch workers' movement. From 1905, he co-edited the newspaper
De Vrije Communist; from 1906, the magazine
Grond en Vrijheid, and from 1911, the
General Confederation of Labour (CGT)'s newspaper
La Bataille syndicaliste. In 1907, he participated in the
International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam and established international links with syndicalists of other countries, culminating with their foundation of the
Bulletin International du Mouvement Syndicaliste, which ran weekly issues until the outbreak of
World War I in 1914. He was one of the signatories of the
Manifesto of the Sixteen and attempted to win over Dutch supporters to the
defencist position, but he was unsuccessful. After the war, he became a regular contributor to
Les Temps nouveaux and continued to write works of socialist economic theory. He and his wife divorced in 1922. He remained a leading figure in the international syndicalist movement throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Cornelissen died on 21 January 1942, in the southern French commune of
Domme. ==Selected works==