Tintin’ s creator was never a far-Right propagandist
Hergé may have worked for a Nazi-sanctioned newspaper but he did not defend fascism, says Patrick West
25 April 2008

Hergé: His reputation has been haunted by allegations of racism and misogyny

The Adventures of Hergé, Creator of Tintin by Michael Farr,
John Murray £20 Posterity has not been kind to Hergé. In many ways, his life resembles that of P G Wodehouse. Both authors were unfairly accused of being Nazi collaborators (Hergé having written for the Belgian Le Soir newspaper in the 1940s when it was a sanctioned organ of the German occupying administration); both their works suggested an unconscious misogynistic mindset: Wodehouse's world was one in which the only female characters were airheaded or manipulative girlfriends, or the aunts Dahlia (bossy) and Agatha (terrifying); Hergé's only real female character was the monstrous pest, Bianca Castafiore, based on Maria Callas. And both Hergé's and Wodehouse's tales centred on two asexual characters, one of whom was phlegmatic and rational, the other spirited and tempestuous: Tintin and Haddock, Jeeves and Wooster.

Hergé's protagonists have always been subject to gossip and innuendo as to the precise nature of their relationship. But Captain Haddock and Tintin shared a bond similar to that of Jeeves and Wooster. There was no suggestion of homosexuality, for the same reason that no one thought Laurel and Hardy were gay, or that Father Ted and Father Dougal were, either. They were just two men condemned to be companions, much like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple.

Allegations haunted George Remi - who took the pen name Hergé - throughout his life. His mentor had been the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Fr Norbert Wallez at Le Petit Vingtième Siècle, a man who had a signed photograph of Mussolini on his desk. And it is true that some of Hergé's earlier crude work could be described as ultra-conservative. Tintin in the Congo's depiction of servile Africans grateful for the intervening hand of Belgian imperialists is perhaps the most notorious example, and so uncomfortable were British publishers with its content that it was only translated into English in 1991, 60 years after Tintin au Congo had first been published. Only last year the Commission for Racial Equality urged that it be removed from bookshops in Britain. Likewise Le Lotus Bleu (1936), which perpetuated Oriental stereotypes about cunning, cruel and martial Japanese, only became The Blue Lotus in 1983.

But the notion that Hergé was a surreptitious far-Right propagandist ignores the ambivalence contained within his oeuvre. Le Lotus Bleu may have been anti-Japanese, but this is because it was emphatically pro-Chinese, and if it depicted the Japanese as militaristic, this is because Japan was militaristic in the 1930s. And if Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is anti-Soviet propaganda, then at least it was accurate, honest propaganda. Perhaps, like Bertrand Russell or Malcolm Muggeridge (whose Manchester Guardian reports he consulted), Hergé was not fooled by the dangerous and delusional promises of Communism.

Le Lotus Bleu's other villains are the racist and opportunistic westerners who settled in the British protectorate, just as Tintin en Amérique (1932) casts a dim view of the white man's mistreatment of Native Americans. Indeed, just as his 1929-30 comic strip series Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du Petit 'Vingtième', au pays des Soviets was a coruscating attack on Soviet Russia, Tintin in America (1932) satirised the excesses of capitalism.

Hergé did work for a German-sanctioned newspaper during the Second World War, but he did not compose propaganda; quite the reverse - his compositions during the occupation are the least political and totally eschewed the current affairs found in his previous work. While Le Sceptre d'Ottokar (1939; King Ottokar's Sceptre, 1958) was a direct allegorical condemnation of the Anschluss, Le Crabe aux Pinces d'or (1941; The Crab with The Golden Claws, 1958) was a desert adventure, L'Étoile Mystérieuse (1942; The Shooting Star, 1961), concerned the discovery of a meteorite and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (1944; Red Rackham's Treasure, 1958) was an old-fashioned fortune hunt. Farr also points out that such adventures in the pages of Le Soir provided escapist relief from the grim realities of war, and it is worth noting that Tintin became something of a liberal in later adventures: campaigning against weapons of mass destruction in L'Affaire Tournesol (1956; The Calculus Affair, 1956) exposing the slave trade in Coke en Stock (1958; The Red Sea Sharks, 1958) and, now sporting a CND logo on his bicycle helmet, preventing a bloody coup in South America in Tintin et les Picaros (1976; Tintin and the Picaros: 1976). In the unfinished and posthumously published Tintin et l'Alph-Art (1986; Tintin and Alpha Art, 1986), Captain Haddock even gives up his beloved whisky and discovers marijuana.

This is one of the many fascinating vignettes in this beautifully illustrated work, whose only flaw is that its non-chronological structure lends itself to repetition. Thomson and Thompson were based, it is argued, on Hergé's father and uncle, who were identical twins; Snowy, or Milou in French, was named after his childhood sweetheart, Marie-Louise Van Cutsem, whose father eventually forbade her from seeing the young Remi, to his lasting sorrow. Castafiore was not so much based on Callas, Farr suggests; Hergé's inspiration came, he argues, from another family member, Hergé's aunt Ninie, who was fond of singing loudly, often and badly. In any case, Hergé was not a misogynist (the absence of female characters is the norm in detective and adventure genres); he just hated opera.

Fascinated by Jung, the paranormal, dreams and abstract art (he was a friend of Andy Warhol), Georges Remi emerges as an agreeable figure, if shy and rather gloomy. He was particularly hurt by being portrayed as a fascist apologist. If anything he was, ultimately, a pessimist. By the end of the Tintin series, the boy reporter's profession was portrayed as one now concerned with little more than tittle-tattle, celebrity and gossip: the paparazzi in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963; The Castafiore Emerald, 1963) are freeloading hacks with little concern for reporting the truth. Tintin in the Picaros is the most disparaging. The last frames of the book show that the peaceful coup has changed nothing. The majority of the populace still lives in poverty, having merely exchanged one corrupt dictator for another. For once, Tintin just wants to go home.