André Malraux (1901-1976) and Robert Brasillach (1909-1945) were engaged French novelists who held radically different positions on the ideological spectrum of the 1930s and 1940s. While Malraux sympathized with communism and joined the French Resistance in the Second World War, Brasillach promoted fascism and collaborated with the German occupier. Despite their obviously different backgrounds, both writers presented types of imagined communities in their novels, two of which will be under scrutiny here: respectively L’espoir (1937) and Les sept couleurs (1939). The novels are sufficiently different from each other to illustrate communities of diverse sorts, Les sept couleurs showcasing images of the nation in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain, L’espoir picturing a group of international activists defending the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Yet they are similar enough to be compared and to lay bare the ways in which communities are conceptualized in and through literature.

Both literary works can be considered romans à these which portray contemporary events through an ideological lens, anti-fascist or fascist. Interestingly, in both L’espoir and Les sept couleurs, time takes on a crucial meaning and function in the shaping of communities. Beneath the surface of political ideology, at a deeper level, time is a leitmotif connected to a wide range of themes that touch, directly or indirectly, on temporal aspects of imagined communities: the acceleration of history, the idea of decadence and the process of aging and death.