Soft Skull News

Given the hue-and-cry over Tintin in the Congo, we here at Soft Skull thought some context might be in order...herewith a short excerpt from our forthcoming Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy

Tintin’s political origins lie on the right, to put it mildly. The Petit Vingtième was a strict Catholic newspaper and, as Hergé himself told Numa Sadoul, ‘“Catholic” at that time meant “anti-Bolchevik”.’ It also meant anti-Semitic. The paper’s editor, the Abbé Norbert Wallez, kept a signed photograph of Mussolini on his desk. Many of the journalists who wrote for him had links to the more-or-less fascist Belgian party Rex.

This political orientation not only found its way into the strips; it was their raison d’être. Tintin’s first outing is primarily a piece of propaganda, ‘exposing’ the evils of Communism. His second, to the Congo (which appeared in book form in French in 1931 but has never been deemed acceptable for translation into English– although, much to the exasperation of European liberals, it remains hugely popular in Africa) [this was at the time of writing, Little Brown is finally publishing in the US this coming Fall], depicts Africans as good at heart but backwards and lazy, in need of European mastery. In The Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus, both of which appeared in the mid-thirties, we have villains who are typical enemies of the right, key players in the great global conspiracy of its imagination: freemasons, financiers and, behind it all, thinly veiled by a Greek name, the blatantly Semitic Rastapopoulos. The rightwing strain in Hergé’s work reaches its apex when, writing the original newspaper version of The Shooting Star at the height of the Nazi era, he invents a Jewish villain (the New York banker Blumenstein) and has a shopkeeper named Isaac rub his hands with glee when it seems the world will end. Why? Because, as he explains to his friend Solomon, ‘I owe 50,000 francs to my suppliers, and this way I won’t have to pay them.’

But almost as soon as this right-wing tendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing counter-tendency. In Tintin in America, which he published in book form in 1932, Hergé bitingly satirises capitalist mass-production and American racism (the English translation has been softened: what the small-town bank clerk really tells the police who turn up after a heist is: ‘We immediately lynched seven Negroes’ – not ‘hoboes’ – ‘but the culprit got away.’). In The Blue Lotus Tintin snaps the cane with which an American oil magnate has been beating a Chinese rickshaw driver, exclaiming ‘Brute! Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!’

Mark, US-based knower of things Tintin, also offers perspective.

UPDATE: Josh Glenn, at the Boston Globe's great Brianiac blog, has yet more perspective.