The Politics of Tintin

A long march to the Left?

The Tintin series starts with a propagandistic piece attacking life in the Soviet Union,

and ends with Tintin exchanging his plus fours for flared trousers, and with a CND symbol on his motorcycle helmet. Is this a reversal of the normal trend of people becoming more conservative with age? Or is there more consistency in Hergé’s position than at first appears?

Tintin started life in the late 1920s as a strip in the conservative Belgian magazine Le XXe Siecle. Hergé’s colleagues included Léon Degrelle, later to be leader of the fascist Rexist party which had some success in the mid 1930s. Degrelle’s bravery commanding Walloon SS troops led Hitler to comment Degrelle was the sort of son Hitler would like to have had. The director of the magazine was a reactionary priest Fr Wallez who disapproved of staff remaining single, and seems to have put pressure on to bring about Hergé’s first marriage with Wallez’ secretary, herself a Fascist sympathiser.

The first couple of books seem to bear out this deeply conservative trend. Nothing portrayed in the Tintin in the Land of the Soviets exceeds the sort of things happening at the time. This ranges from oppression at home to gullible Western visitors being shown factories apparently fully operational with chimneys emitting smoke, but actually caused by hay being burnt inside the derelict building which could have come out of one of Malcom Muggeridge’s articles for the Manchester Guardian. But the idea of a secret hideout in the middle of the steppes where ‘Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin have collected together wealth stolen from the people’ and the energetic but absurd plots with the OGPU (secret police) are in stark contrast to the much better structured and researched later books, and Hergé was always slightly embarrassed about his first work.

Tintin in the Congo is even more memory holed today, and is no longer available at all in English. In practice is it condescending towards the Congolese without any particular malice. The book was already toned down somewhat as early as 1946 by Hergé, who commented later ‘I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved’. The book was designed to seek to stir more enthusiasm for the colony among the apathetic Belgian population, without much obvious success.

Tintin in America casts an interesting light on Hergé’s world view. The book reminds somewhat of early Evelyn Waugh in the blended relish and repulsion at the energy of modern America. Cars smashed up in road accidents are converted into tin cans, while discarded tin cans are recycled into metal sheets for making cars. The abattoir has a conveyor belt to turn a cow into salami. Most striking of all is the brutal treatment of the Native Americans. Tintin discovers an oil well, is bombarded with bids for the rights, only to tell the oilmen that the land actually belongs to the Indians, at which point they are promptly marched off the site at the point of a bayonet. Two hours later there is scaffolding on the site, three hours the “Cactus and Petroleum Bank” is being built, the next morning there are already traffic jams in the new city.

For some of Hergé’s apologists like Tom McCarthy, the criticism of capitalism starting in this book are portrayed as an early sign of Tintin’s ‘left wing counter tendency’. It seems to me there is a misunderstanding here of a frame of mind that is really old style European conservative. Consistently through the books, Herge has sympathy for native populations seeking to hold out against civilization – Burke’s ‘little platoons’, perhaps. In Prisoners of the Sun the Inca civilisation continues in secret. He lovingly portrays Lamas in Tibet and monasteries complete with levitating monks. In The Seven Crystal Balls, a fellow train passenger criticises the archaeological expeditions “why can’t they leave them in peace? What’d we say if the Egyptians or the Peruvians came over here and started digging up our kings?”

There is something pleasantly even handed about the way Hergé teases every civilization he comes across; mad Italian drivers; Haddock riding the sacred cow in India; The native Americans who can’t go back to war until they find the lost hatchet that they buried last time; Arabs naively taken in by Olivera’s sales patter; General Alcazar’s South American army with its “49 corporals and 3487 colonels”.

Those seeking to improve the world receive mixed treatment. The English colonial officials in India all turn out to be agents of a drug running organisation. Ridgewell has spent decades trying to protect the Arumbaya tribe in the Amazon, an admirable mission, but as futile as his attempts to teach them golf. In Tinin in America, the train is stopped by an old woman from an animal rights organization demanding the train staff intervene to stop a puma attacking a deer.

Hergé struggled for years to live down accusations that he collaborated during the war. The few Tintin books that have any serious political content are from the 1930s, however, and could not be further from fascism. The Blue Lotus gives a deeply hostile take on the Japanese intervention in China and an equally unflattering one of the International Settlement. Hergé’s close friendship with a Chinese catholic student led to a highly sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese cause and people, including some sections with Tintin criticising Western prejudices towards China that are laid on with a trowel as much as the most politically correct books of today “the same stupid Europeans are quite convinced that all Chinese have tiny feet and even now little Chinese girls suffer agonies with bandages designed to prevent their feet developing normally”

The Broken Ear is a biting parody of the actual Bolivian-Paraguan war, right down to the competing American and British oil interests behind it, and the thinly disguised portrait of Sir Basil Zaharoff of Vickers, the arms dealer selling to both sides. Throughout the series, wars are instigated or exploited by shady business interests.

There is negligible conventional politics in Tintin. Governments change in South America and the Arab world through coups. Tinin intervenes in Tinin and the Picaros to prevent General Alcaraz having his rival General Tapioca shot, much to the latter’s mortification “do you want me completely dishonoured?”.

Indeed the most positive government portrayed is probably that of Syldavia in King Ottokar’s Sceptre; an absolutist monarchy in a country that exports “wheat, mineral water, horses and violinists” but which mysteriously supports a modern airforce and later a nuclear programme. The rival state, Borduria, is run by an obvious blend of Hitler and Mussolini ‘Muesstler’, with an air force equipped with impeccably drawn contemporary German machines.

When war and occupation came, critics like Lawrence Grove suggest there were ‘overtly pro Nazi’ elements in wartime works like The Shooting Star[1]. This seems massively unfair. Léon Degrelle offered Hergé a job as illustrator for the Rexists when he and they were flying high, but Hergé turned it down. His main offence was to move from Le Petit Vingtieme when it was closed by the Nazis and carry on working at the collaborationist paper Le Soir. He produced works which were increasingly apolitical – The Crab with the Golden Claws based on drug trafficking, the Inca works The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun and the historical books The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. He made some unfortunate drawings in The Shooting Star mocking Jews welcoming the end of the world because they would not need to pay their bills, but seems to have thought better of these and removed them from the book version as early as 1942.

The Black Island (set in Scotland) and Tintin in America were banned by the occupying authorities, though bizarrely King Ottokar’s Sceptre with its barely disguised anti-fascist tone was allowed to remain on the shelves. One of the ironies of the war was the way that Belgium with its collaborating government and King was better able to deflect some of the worst features of occupation than German administered Netherlands which lost, for example, proportionately twice as many of its Jewish citizens. Hergé always privately resented the way cartoonists were singled out at liberation when nobody blamed tram drivers or bakers for having continued working.

After the war, Hergé’s suspicion of America displayed in Tinin and America and The Shooting Star continues to a degree, with Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon seeing a European expedition battling unscrupulous, probably American, rivals. The Iron Curtain takes a bow, with Syldavia’s rival Borduria now having a distinctly Warsaw Pact feel and providing secret police advisory services to South American states like San Rico.

There is certainly a superficial shift to the left in later books. Hergé seems above all to have been quite a conformist, and his social circle had moved a long way from conservative Belgian Catholics once he began to attempt a new start as an abstract artist and became a friend of Andy Warhol.

So he includes a peace symbol or two. Calculus destroys the blueprints for his deadly weapon in The Calculus Affair. The gypsies in The Castafiore Diamond are portrayed as largely misunderstood. . But Hergé’s fundamental scepticism remains. In Flight 714 to Sydney, the idealistic nationalist revolutionaries turn out to have been patsies of the international criminal Rastapopulus. And the last complete book Tintin and the Picaros ends with baton twirling police patrolling the same shanty town as at the beginning, only with the ‘Viva Tapioca’ sign replaced with ‘Viva Alcaraz’.

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[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/scottish-kilt-helped-tintin-come-out-as-more-pc-comic-hero-says-expert/?utm_source=chatgpt.com