The young designer swallowed. In front of the imposing building located at number 11 on boulevard Bisschoffsheim, in Brussels, he is no longer too sure of his choice. Headquarters of the Vingtième Siècle, “Catholic journal of doctrine and information”, the building is regularly shaken by loud voices. Norbert Wallez, director of the publication, is a volcanic abbot weighing 110 kilos who does not mince his words. The employees summoned to his office are as intimidated by his thunderous personality as by the autographed portrait of Benito Mussolini pouting in the corner of the room.
But in January 1929, it was with a smile that the abbot greeted the drawings of Georges Remi (1907-1983), whose inverted initials gave him his pen name, Hergé. The person concerned is in heaven: after months of boring freelance work and anonymity, he will finally be able to show what he is worth! His puff-puffed reporter made his big debut on January 10, 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, the youth supplement of the Brussels newspaper. The first adventure should set the tone: it is entitled Tintin in the Lands of the Soviets.
Propaganda at the end of the pencil
In keeping with the newspaper’s beliefs, the publication is fiercely anti-communist. The hero and his fox terrier Snowy face a horde of Bolshevik terrorists against a backdrop of bread shortages and rigged elections. Abbot Wallez is not known for his subtlety… But the recipe works and the readers are won over.
The following year, in 1930, Hergé persisted and signed by sending his protagonist to the Congo (current DRC), which was a territory held by the Belgian king Leopold II since 1885, before becoming a Belgian colony between 1908 and 1960. This destination is not insignificant: the Catholic and ultranationalist publication aims to romanticize colonization so that young Belgians come to settle there, while saluting the work of missionaries.
Of course, the drawing of the 22-year-old designer, a former scout troop leader, is strongly influenced by the customs of his time. Hergé never went to Africa: he contented himself with cutting out newspaper articles and therefore spreading the clichés maintained by royal propaganda. We neither mention the hands cut off by the settlers nor the terrible famines which devastate the country.
The language of the Congolese is basic, infantile, flourishing on caricatured faces – flat noses, prominent lips, laughing smiles or stunned expressions – which recall the posters of colonial exhibitions. The white man is revered there, reputed to be lively and intelligent, drawing a striking contrast with the docile, lazy and stupid natives. “I couldn’t help but think of black people as big children.”Hergé confided later.
Controversy? And how! Even during the Belgian designer’s lifetime, he had to rework his plates in order to attenuate certain features. For example, a geography session that the reporter gave to the Congolese on “your homeland, Belgium” was replaced after the war by a lesson… in mathematics.
Hergé literally reworked his entire work. Several times for some albums. A comparison of the different versions of Tintin in the Congo is a journey through time. pic.twitter.com/KILe9TaJ9L
— Pieter Fannes (@FannesPieter) March 3, 2023
“I was nourished by the prejudices of the environment in which I livedthe author defended himself in the 1970s. (…) And I drew them, these Africans, according to these criteria, in the pure paternalistic spirit which was that of the time in Belgium. Taken to task by anti-racist collectives, the publisher Casterman ended up accepting, in 2023, the addition of a preface detailing the context of the time… even if it is signed by a convinced “Tintinophile”.
Tintin among the collaborators
In May 1940, the occupation of Belgium by Nazi Germany put a brake on the publication of Le Vingtième Siècle. The star designer is repatriated to the columns of Le Soir, a collaborationist newspaper, where his sketches rub shoulders with openly anti-Semitic pamphlets. “The war seemed to be over for usHergé would later say. So I had no qualms about collaborating with a newspaper like Le Soir. I was working, that’s all.” Coincidence? In The Mysterious Staran album published between 1941 and 1942, Tintin meets a hook-nosed banker called Blumenstein… There are also two panels showing caricatured Jews rejoicing at the end of the world – a mirror of the conspiracy theories of the time.
Can we still talk about an accident? Now aged 34, Hergé is no longer as easily influenced as when he started. His drawing has matured, his convictions too and he continues to frequent Catholic and nationalist circles. In addition, in 1942 he signed an anti-Semitic caricature to illustrate the Fables by Robert de Vroylande, one of whose stories ends with a dubious moral: “A Jew always finds someone more Jewish than himself.”
To a friend who reproaches him for his beliefs, Hergé specifies in a letter: “I am neither Germanophile nor Anglophile. I admit, however, that I like the notion of “new order”. (…) But we can also assume that Germany only seeks to deceive us and that it would consider us slaves if its hegemony on the continent remained with it. Well, even if Germany chose slavery, I would at least have a clear conscience and be able to do myself this justice –assuming that my opinion has any importance– that I would have done nothing to prevent this collaboration from happening.”
Was Hergé deeply racist or simply a war opportunist, cronying with the occupier to continue to keep his hero alive during these dark years? The courts which judged him after the Second World War recognized his misdeeds, prohibiting him – for a time – from practicing his profession. The controversial boards will end up, again, being whitewashed: the two controversial boxes will be censored The Mysterious Star upon its publication as an album, in September 1942, while the character Blumenstein was renamed Bohlwinkel, which comes from a Brussels slang word for a confectionery shop.
In the meantime, we must recognize that certain of Tintin’s commitments contrast with the distressing ideology carried by Tintin in the Congo Or The Mysterious Star. The reporter places himself on the side of the oppressed in Tintin in America (1932) and The Blue Lotus (1935). He prevents a fascist coup in Ottokar’s Scepter (1939) where an odious “Müsstler” appears, a contraction of the surnames Mussolini and Hitler.
However, this will not save its author from being banned. Considered “uncivil” because of his troubled allegiances (Abbot Wallez, his former mentor, was sentenced to five years in prison) and also pinned to a “Gallery of Traitors”, considered collaborators during the world conflict, Hergé will continue year after year to keep his art alive.
Even if he quickly returned to success, the designer of Adventures of Tintin will remain until the end of his life besieged with questions about his dubious positions. He will recognize having been a “sponge” of the nauseating values of his time. And there will generally be tribunes to defend him, in the name of anti-wokism or quite simply his 270 million albums sold.
“It’s true that I’m not proud of certain drawingsconcedes Hergé towards the end of his life, on the subject of the anti-Semitic caricatures of The Mysterious Star. But you can believe me, if I had known at the time the nature of the persecutions and the “Final Solution”, I would not have done them. I didn’t know. Or maybe, like so many others, I managed not to know.”
