Ideology of Tintin

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Hergé started drawing his comics series The Adventures of Tintin in 1929 for Le Petit Vingtième, the children's section of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, run by the abbot Norbert Wallez, an avid supporter of social Catholicism, a right-wing movement. During World War II, Tintin appeared in the Brussels daily Le Soir; after the war he appeared in his own magazine, Tintin (founded by a member of the Resistance, Raymond Leblanc) until Hergé's death in 1983.

As a young artist Hergé was influenced by his mentors, specifically the abbot Norbert Wallez, who encouraged Hergé to use Tintin as a tool for Catholic propaganda to influence Belgian children. This shows in his earlier works within the Tintin series. As a result, European right-wing stereotypes pervade through Hergé's early catalogue. A breakthrough came in 1934, when the cartoonist was introduced to Zhang Chongren, a Chinese student, who explained Chinese politics, culture, language, art, and philosophy to him, which Hergé used to great effect in The Blue Lotus. From this point onward, the artist developed ideologically, amidst the collapse of his country and the Second World War, and so did the series, becoming more progressive and universalist -- till the final album, when a certain cynicism can be detected.

Contents

[edit] First albums

Tintin's first album, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was crafted on the orders of Hergé's superiors, to be anti-Soviet propaganda of limited outlook. Nonetheless, Hergé worked willingly: "I was sincerely convinced of being on the right path," as he said later. 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, appearing not much more than a decade after the October Revolution, Douillet denounced the communist system for producing poverty, famine and terror. The secret police maintained order and the propaganda deceived foreigners. (Some of Douillet's denunciations have not aged well: he criticizes the Soviets for introducing co-ed high schools, for instance.)

Nonetheless, the anti-totalitarian theme of this first book would persist throughout the series.

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 Belgian Congo: the colony needed white workers at the time.

Tintin in the Congo reflected the dominant colonialist ideology at that time. As put by Hergé in a later interview, "This was in 1930. All I knew about the Congo was what people were saying about it at the time: 'The Negroes are big children, it's fortunate for them that we're there, etc.'"

Later, for the 1946 color edition of the album, Hergé toned down or removed some of the worst excesses: for instance, the Belgian history class given by Tintin to black students was changed into a mathematics class.

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 trafficking.

[edit] Turn-around from Tintin in America (1931-1932) to The Black Island (1937-1938)

At last, with his next album, Hergé could send Tintin to the United States. Tintin in America (1932) represents a significant change in tone. Of course, this album was, like the previous ones, very caricatured, 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 lynching, the theft of Indian lands, and American business rapacity.

Even more striking is the fifth album, The Blue Lotus (1934-1935), set in China. For this story Hergé was put in touch with Zhang Chongren, a Chinese student then studying in Brussels. Hergé was very concerned to portray the country accurately, and the adventure can be read as anti-imperialist. It criticizes Japanese and Western involvement in China, including the international concessions and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and shows (with great disapproval) Westerners making racist or ignorant remarks about the Chinese. The Japanese themselves are portrayed with little sympathy.

The Broken Ear (1935-1936) is set mainly in the fictional South American republic of San Theodoros and takes a critical view of western businessmen conspiring to provoke a war over what they think will be profitable oil fields. They go about this using bribery, corruption and selling arms to both sides. It then simply requires a border confrontation to be blown out of proportion in order to begin the conflict, much like the Mukden Incident shown in The Blue Lotus. The war over the Grand Chapo oil plains was based on the Chaco War of the early 1930s. It also depicted the Shuar indigenous people, famous for their tsantsas ("shrunken heads"), according to the classic barbarian stereotype.

At first glance, The Black Island (1937-1938) is a simple thriller with Tintin in pursuit of money forgers, with the chase to Scotland giving it a feel of Alfred Hitchcock's recent movie version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. However some research suggests that villain Dr. J.W. Müller was based on Georg Bell, a British adventurer who became a naturalised German and was an associate of Nazi leader Ernst Röhm. An article published in the February 1934 edition of Le Crapouillot claims that Bell was involved in a plot to forge Russian roubles. It has often been claimed that the Germans did forge bank notes in an attempt to upset the British economy during World War Two. On the other hand, the inclusion of the big-bearded Jewish-looking gang leader might suggest that the forgers are just standard crooks and not foreign agents from Nazi Germany. (Source Tintin: The Complete Companion by Michael Farr, ISBN-10: 0719555221, ISBN-13: 978-0719555220.)

[edit] 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 in favor of the neutrality of Belgium, King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938-1939) was obviously anti-Nazi: Musstler (MUSSolini-hiTLER) is the leader of a conspiracy that seeks to merge the kingdom of Syldavia with its old enemy Borduria. The story is directly based on the Anschluss in Austria in 1938.

The early and unfinished version of Land of Black Gold (1939-1940) alluded to the mobilization of Nazi war power. The beginning of the war and the defeat of Belgium prevented Hergé from finishing this version, though he did rewrite it later.

Thus, to avoid controversy during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Tintin's adventures during the war years focused on non-political issues such as drug smuggling (The Crab with the Golden Claws), intrigue and treasure hunts (The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure) and a mysterious curse (The Seven Crystal Balls).

Somewhat controversial though was The Shooting Star, which was about a race between two crews trying to reach a meteorite which had landed in the Arctic. Hergé chose the subject to be as fantastic as possible, to avoid trouble from the censors. Nonetheless politics intruded in that the crew Tintin joined was composed of Europeans from Axis or neutral countries, while their underhanded rivals were Americans. The Americans' financial backer had a distinctly Jewish name. Later, the banker's location and name were changed; the former to fictional South-American country Sao Rico, the name to equally Jewish Bohlwinkel. According to Hergé, both the original and the later name were honest mistakes (Thompson, 1991); he thought Blumenstein was a common American name, and chose Bohlwinkel because it sounded like "bollewinkel", candy store. Tintin also flies in a German plane in the album (an Arado Ar 196).

Most damaging of all for Hergé was that these stories were published in Le Soir, a collaborationist newspaper. After the war he and other members of its staff faced lenghty investigations into their wartime allegiances.

[edit] Post-war

The post-war albums are less controversial, developing several recurring themes:

Hergé was however criticized for his depiction of the black victims in The Red Sea Sharks; in the first edition they speak pidgin French and seem rather simple-minded. He rewrote their dialogue in later editions.

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. For the first time, Tintin seems to be flesh and blood, and perhaps even has weaknesses; for instance, he is at first uncharacteristically unwilling to travel to San Theodoros, where his friends have been jailed on trumped-up charges. At the end he intervenes dramatically, through revolution, no less. But there are no good guys and bad guys in the political background here: Gen. Alcazar is financed by a banana company, Gen. Tapioca by the para-Stalinists of Borduria. And in the very last panel of his very last finished album, Hergé shows police patrolling the slums; the inhabitants are no better off and no worse; all that has changed are the uniforms and the names on the political placards.

[edit] Sexism

Hergé has also been accused of sexism, due to the almost complete lack of female characters in his books. Indeed, most women in Tintin's adventures are secondary characters, usually caretakers. Moreover, these women don't present a flattering image of women: for instance, General Alcazar's wife is an awful shrew. The only woman character of importance in a world of men is Bianca Castafiore.

Hergé himself denied being a misogynist, saying that "for me, women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin's, which is the realm of male friendship..." Also, in contrast to such arguments against Hergé, there are notable, however rare, examples of realistic and deep female characters at certain junctions within the series.

[edit] References

The Adventures of Tintin
Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin
Characters: Supporting · Minor · Complete list
Miscellany: Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations
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