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This article examines the difficulties faced by the French Communist Party in developing its anti-colonial activities in France and Algeria during the second half of the 1920s. The French Communist Party was the first political entity to call for the abolition of the indigenous status, and then for Algeria’s independence. While following orders from Moscow, the Party encountered strong grassroots resistance on both sides of the Mediterranean, opposition that is meticulously described here using Comintern archives. The circulations and transactions that took place between Moscow, Paris, and Algiers within Communist circles are crucial to understand both the emergence of the Algerian national movement, and the birth of militant anti-colonialism in France.