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This article engages with the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological manifestations of the colonial illusion in French interwar serialized novels (romans-fleuves) while focusing on Jules Romains’s Les Hommes de bonne volonté (initially published in twenty-seven instalments or livres between 1932 and 1946). In discussing key narrative scenes and strategies of characterization as they relate to notions of empire, exoticism, colonial spaces and destinies, as well as critiques of colonialism, it contends that this overlooked corpus of French literature, which also includes authors such as Roger Martin du Gard and Romain Rolland, deserves closer scrutiny for both aesthetic and ideological reasons, and it invites reflection on the implicit criteria that exclude such work from the usual corpus of literary representations of colonialism. The study of these texts reveals both changes and continuities between the interwar period and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century modes of literary representation of key social and cultural issues, such as the universalist vocation of France, the (post-)colonial elsewhere, and the debate over national identity.