The pieds noirs were hard to like

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 324.

The pieds noirs were hard to like. The rich had the wherewithal to relocate to metropolitan France, but the bulk of the settlers, some of whom had originally fled Prussian-occupied Alsace after 1870, were determined not to flee again. There were also those with nowhere to run, such as the polyglot petit blancs of Algiers’ working-class Bab el-Oued (River’s Gate), a rough waterfront district known as the proletarian Riviera. There the colons were as likely to be Corsican, Italian, Maltese or Spanish as ethnically French. Before the war many of them voted Communist, which eased their later transition to temperamentally similar Fascism. They lived close by their Muslim neighbours, mixing penny capitalism with petty crime. By the early 1950s such people had discovered a new saviour in the movement created by Pierre Poujade, the voice of militant anti-state and anti-Semitic artisans and shopkeepers in the depressed southern departments of metropolitan France. Poujade’s pretty wife was from Algiers, which gave poujadism its entrée into France’s oldest colony.

Although many petits blancs were reflexively anti-Semitic, they had an unbounded admiration for Israel for demonstrating how to bash uppity Arabs around, a syndrome repeated among the Afrikaners of South Africa. There were also complex allegiances on the Muslim side, leaving aside those who served in colonial regiments of the army. Many Muslim caids did well out of the colonial regime, which was not true of the many poor and unemployed Muslims, especially those crammed into Algiers’ historic kasbah, where 80,000 people lived densely crammed into about forty acres. There was also the issue of vicious FLN sectarianism, which forced those who knew they were excluded into the arms of the French.