With Europeans comprising the large proportion of its membership (which was only 12,000), the P.C.A. tended to support the petits blancs rather than the Muslims, and, not without reason, Algerian nationalists had come to regard it as being tarred with the racist and anti-religious brush of Stalinism. It was closely associated with the French Communist Party and aligned to Moscow, where the acquisition of the soul of the French worker (who had only the most meagre natural sympathy for the Algerian, seen either as an immigrant worker threatening his own job, or as a rebel killing and mutilating working-class pieds noirs) clearly rated a higher priority than the national aspirations of a few million non-Communist Algerians.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 423