Guyot was one of the leading French laissez-faire economists at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century. He began his career as editor of several Republcian newspapers and journals in the late 1860s and early 1870s when France was wracked by the turmoil of the Paris Commune and Franco-Prussian War. In the Third Republic he was elected to the Paris Municipal Council and in 1885 to the national Chamber of Deputies. In 1889 he was appointed Minister of Public Works. He was active in classical liberal economic circles as editor of the Journal des Économistes, president of the Paris Société des Économistes, a member of the British Cobden Club and the Royal Statistical Society, and also a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Among his many interests were taxation policy and opposition to socialism in all its forms.