From the very outset, Algerian nationalists’ enthusiasm for global antiimperialism was tempered with a healthy scepticism. On his arrival at the 1927 Anti-Imperialist Congress, the young Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj expressed consternation at the opulent surroundings in which the leading lights of anticolonialism would be debating the deprivation and oppression of their peoples. For Messali, a committed street activist deeply embedded in the proletarian Algerian migrant community of Paris, the “beautiful, monumental” Palais d’Egmont, with its “multi-coloured marble,” “did not fit with the modesty of Communists and revolutionaries.” Messali and the movement he would come to lead may have been ardent partisans of the message of global anticolonial revolution, but their embrace of the Communist-sponsored organizations of anti-imperialist struggle, including the League Against Imperialism (LAI), would take place only on their terms. In their struggle for the independence of their homeland, they would also seek to forge an independent international anti-imperialism whose relationship to “sympathising organisations” such as the LAI2 was neither subservient nor openly hostile, but rather completely dependent on the political interests and strategy of the Algerian nationalist movement. Contrary to the ambitions of the Comintern and the wildest fears of the French security services, the LAI did not become the vehicle for Communist control of Algerian nationalism and the broader anticolonial movement in Paris in which it was the dominant force. Rather, this article contends that the often contentious relationship between Algerian nationalists and the Comintern-supported anti-imperialist movement in Paris explains, in part, both the relative weakness of the French branch of the LAI and the emergence of a kind of “homegrown” anti-imperial solidarity within Algerian nationalism. It further argues that the complex blend of conflict and cooperation between the nascent Algerian nationalism and the early organizations of international anti-imperialism shaped the evolution of both movements in the longue durée.

A Movement Born of International Anti-Imperialism

While historians of Algeria have vigorously debated the intellectual origins of modern nationalism in the country, they are united in the belief that the political impetus for the first mass nationalist movement emerged from radicals among the migrant population in metropolitan France. These men, and they were almost always men, would be the driving force behind this new form of political contestation, but they lacked the experience, the resources, and the knowledge to mobilize and organize their compatriots under the flag of Algerian nationalism.