Tintin's Father Hergé And The Collaborationist Shadow

Next came the conservative Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, the publication that would introduce the boy reporter to the world, but which would also be the first chapter in a series of fascist-leaning employers. As the tuft-haired journalist exposed the Bolshevik regime in the children’s pages of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the strip’s commercial success prompted editor-in-chief Father Norbert Wallez – who had a framed picture of Mussolini on his desk – to commission another series, this time urging Hergé to send his characters to the Congo in support of the Belgian colonial system.
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The result was Tintin in the Congo, an album in which the natives are depicted as uncultured simpletons in need of European guidance. The now cringe-worthy and patronizing attitude was largely reflective of European society at the time however and, boosted by publicity stunts, Tintin’s popularity soared at home as well as in France. Ultimately it was Hergé’s years at Le Soir, a Nazi propagandist mouthpiece during World War II, that would forever brand the cartoonist with the stamp of collaborator. Especially damning was 1941’s The Shooting Star, which pits our hero against a hook-nosed Jewish financier by the name of Blumenstein.
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In the wake of the war Hergé was arrested many times but never sentenced like many of his compatriots who had worked for German-controlled publications. After a two-year exile from the press, he was eventually allowed to return to work when former resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc put his neck on the line by giving the cartoonist his own Tintin magazine in 1946. Though deeply scarred by the widespread condemnation and by that time prone to bouts of depression, Hergé carried on to complete 24 albums before his death in 1983, which meant a wrap on the series since Tintin was always meant to be the work of one man’s extraordinary imagination.
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While today there are still people leaping to Hergé’s defense and others criticizing the flawed characterizations in his early work – a new back-and-forth was fired off when Spielberg’s film adaptation hit theaters in 2011 – there’s no denying the qualities that made Tintin one of the biggest European comics of the 20th century. The cartoonist’s early fondness of cinema seeped through into the boy reporter’s grand-scale adventures in far-off lands, the exotic details of which, through rigorous research, Hergé made all the more tangible. The physical shenanigans of fumbling officers Thomson and Thompson recall the slapstick glory of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Side characters, such as the whiskey-swilling Captain Haddock, shrill opera diva Bianca Castafiore and near-deaf Professor Calculus, are made endearing because of their flaws, providing a welcome counterbalance to do-gooder Tintin. A lot of Tintinologists – dedicated researchers of the albums and their creator – would argue that Hergé’s talents soared during the War, since Tintin is escapism at its very best.