However, with the pitiful state of his father's affairs, Urbain wasn't allowed back, and the following year he again returned to Marseille.

This act, however, was not enough to appease the Roman Catholic community, made up of Spaniards, Maltese and people from the South of France who composed the new society of colonists in Algeria, who accused him of failing to obtain the blessing of the church for his marriage and the lack of a baptism for his wife.

In an 1857 article in Revue de Paris Urbain denounced the term "Kabylie" as an invention due to the French spirit of systematization, used neither by the Arabs nor by the Berbers of Algeria.

In 1861 he published under the pen name Georges Voisin L’Algérie pour les Algériens (Algeria for the Algerians), in which he defends the idea of an Arab Kingdom that Napoleon III, influenced by the ideas of the Saint-Simonists, had wanted to implement at the instigation of Urbain, but which was fiercely opposed by the colonists and economic interests in Algeria.

The writings of Urbain aroused such passionate reactions that they almost completely overshadowed the ideas which were developed in the ensuing polemics.