The ideology of Tintin
|
|
Comments about Hergé and ideology.
Hergé started making the comic strip series Tintin in 1929 for the children's section of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, run by the Abbé Wallez, a supporter of social Catholicism, a right-wing movement. He continued on other media until his death in 1983.
As a young artist Hergé was influenced by his mentors, specifically the Abbé Wallez. This shows in his most important works, the Tintin series. As the artist develops ideologically, so does the series.
| Contents |
First albums
Tintin's first album, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was an anti-Soviet propaganda of limited outlook. Hergé could not choose the subject of his album, which was decided by the Abbé Wallez, and could not travel to USSR to make his own opinion. His only source was Moscou sans voiles ("Moscow without veils"), a book written in 1928 by Joseph Douillet, former consul of Belgium in the USSR. In this book, Joseph Douillet denounced the communist system : poverty, famine and terror. The secret police maintains order and the propaganda deceives the foreigners.
Despite the fact that the only aim of the album was to warn the young readers against communism (the october revolution had taken place only ten years before !), the denunciation of totalitarism will stay a recurrent theme in Tintin's albums.
Hergé wanted the second album to take place in the United States, which fascinated him. But Wallez disagreed : he distrusted the USA, the country of protestantism, liberalism, of easy money and of gangsters. Instead, he asked Hergé to draw an album about the Congo : the Belgian colony needed white workers at the time.
Tintin in Congo reflected the dominant colonialist ideology at that time. Later, for a re-edition of the album, Hergé tried to erase his worst gaffes : for instance, the Belgian history class given by Tintin to black students was be changed into a mathematics class.
"It was in 1930. All I knew about Congo was what people said at that time : niggers are big kids, fortunately we are there! etc."
But the paternalistic description of the indigenous people of Belgian Congo was more naive than racist, and Hergé developed an important theme of Tintin in this album : international traffics.
Turn-around with Tintin in America and The Blue Lotus
At last, with his next album, Hergé could send Tintin to the United States. Tintin in America was a complete turn-around. Of course, this album was, like the previous ones, very caricatural, because of Hergé's limited knowledge of the country: America was the land of Al Capone, cow-boys, gigantism... But Hergé also took the defense of the American Indians, blacks and blue-collar workers. He criticized lynchings and American liberalism.
Another important album, where Hergé showed his humanist views, was The Blue Lotus (made after his encounter with Chang Chong-jen): his vision of China was more nuanced and the album can be read as anti-imperialist. The album criticizes Japanese and Western involvement in China, including the international concessions and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Some of the unsympathetically-portrayed white characters express blatant racist remarks and slurs.
The Second World War
Several albums were influenced by the menace of a second world war, and then by the war itself and the Nazi occupation of Belgium.
Despite the fact that Hergé was close to the far right Rexist movement, and in favor of the neutrality of Belgium, King Ottokar's Sceptre was obviously anti-Nazi: Musstler (MUSSolini-hiTLER) the dictator of Borduria tried to oust king of Syldavia Muskar XII. The situation was very similar that of Anschluss in Austria in 1938.
The early and unfinished version of The Land of Black Gold alluded to the mobilization. The beginning of the war and the defeat of Belgium prevented Hergé from finishing this album.
A very controversial book was The Shooting Star, which was about a race between two crews trying to reach a meteorite which landed in the arctic seas. This race is a competition between Europeans (German occupied at that time) and Americans. The Americans' financial backer had a distinctly Jewish name, although this was changed in later editions. Tintin also flies a German plane in the album (an Arado Ar 196).
It is certainly not a coincidence that the members of the crew led by Tintin were from neutral European countries, Germany or occupied countries, nor that the "bad guys" were American and Jewish. This was a submission to the German occupier.
It is generally accepted that Hergé, during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, tried to avoid writing controversial Tintin stories. The ones written in that period, The Shooting Star, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, were all stories in which the protagonists leave the known, political world in search of treasure elsewhere.
Post-war
The following albums are less controversial, developing the recurrent themes of Tintin:
- Humanism and anti-racism: The Castafiore Emerald takes part for the Roma.
- Totalitarism: The Calculus Affair is anti-Stalinist ; Tintin and the Picaros
- International traffics: "The Red Sea Sharks"
- Oil multinationals and their influence: Land of Black Gold (and previously in "The Broken Ear")
- Weapons trade: In Flight 714 is obviously mocking the weapon seller Marcel Dassault. In "The Broken Ear" (before war), he had already caricatured a real weapon seller Basil Zaharoff.
Picaros
The last controversial album is Tintin and the Picaros; it has been seen both as left-wing and right-wing. In it, Tintin goes through profound changes. Where the fans were originally put off by cosmetic changes, this is the first album in which Tintin changes from a faceless hero to somebody of flesh and blood. Where in all earlier stories the reporter was able to change his environment for the better, here he is able to change the environment too, through revolution, no less. Or so it seems. For in the very last panel of his very last finished album, Hergé shows how the new order still has the military keeping order in the slums, of which the inhabitants are no better off and no worse.id:Ideologi Tintin