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I'm not French but I lived in France for four years. Speak the language, regularly read French news/social media, so I would probably have as good an insight here as anyone.
Historically France had a much more "expansionist" sense of nationalism. France at the time of the revolution was not a deeply cohesive nation-state, with probably just some 20-25% of the population speaking what we would register as French with a variety of minority languages and cultures proliferating. French nationalists saw the French project as one defined by culture that inferior peoples could (and would) integrate into. You can see that by 1812 France had directly annexed Catalonia, the Low Countries, a strip of northern Germany, the left bank of the Rhine, much of Italy, as well as modern Croatia and Slovenia; these were all deemed to be peoples who, if not French now, could be French in the future. As late as 1919 French nationalists were still arguing that all the people on the left side of the Rhine were more French than German. France, unlike most other European countries, have integrated some colonies directly into the structure of the metropole: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion are not separate overseas territories or dependencies but rather integral regions of France.
The big changes to this mentality came after the 1960s. France lost the war in Algeria, and with it the Algerian provinces that had been annexed into France. Over a million pied-noirs (white settlers) and Algerian Jews left Algeria for France. Around the same time, France turned to the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa for low-income labour. The state also increased offers of education in France for those areas of Africa in the French cultural/colonial sphere (where France still wields considerable influence). Over time the non-European population of France has increased significantly.
So people are basically of three minds. Many right-wingers (and perhaps less openly, people aligned in the center and left) think French identity is primarily racial. You have to have a majority, if not pure (for the more extreme), ethnic connection to the French nation. There's a certain hypocrisy here as people would not say this of the various other waves of European immigrants to France (particularly there has always been a historical connection with Poland), and a not-insignificant number of the most hardline of these are somewhat lacking on this count (like Éric Zemmour, who is a Sephardic Jew). Also from my experience this rhetoric is oriented rather squarely at sub-Saharan Africans, somewhat lesser at Maghrebis, and almost not at all against southeast Asians.
There are other people, probably still the plurality, that consider Frenchness a matter of culture and that anyone can become French. This still involves a lot of snootiness about what that means (French culture of course being manifestly superior in all ways), despite proclamations of laïcité an intense (and not undeserved) skepticism of Islam, and again some extent of double standards with respect to who is "French enough." (No one ever questions whether someone named Nowak or Kowalski is French).
The third group of people are the smallest and mostly left-aligned, particularly with the political party La France Insoumise (communists, basically) who believe the French identity to be completely flexible and not worth all that much to begin with.
How does this work vis-a-vis the Algerians when they held explicit racial pogroms against European French and yet they're happy to be part of greater France when it suits them?
You mean from the perspective of the French, or the Algerians?
It's water under the bridge except for the most bitter nationalists at this point. It's definitely sore for the pieds-noirs but they're dying off. For most French people their issues with Algerians living in France would be much more pointedly about crime or Islam or terrorism, not a conflict barely anyone can remember anymore.
Likewise Algerians are quite happy to come to a more prosperous, stable country; nevermind that once they conquered and tried to colonize you. It's not like contemporary Vietnamese have much gripes with the French either; in fact quite the opposite.
Most of the French people I meet are through martial arts, so I'm way overindexing for Algerians and Tunisians, but there does still seem to be a lot of complaining from those groups. Which is particularly ironic since the ones I tend to meet tend to be of the upper classes in French North Africa who have parents or grandparents that bear the majority of the blame for pillaging the areas
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