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Tintin is a telling reference

Born in Belgium in 1907, Hergé published Tintin in the Belgian right-wing paper Le Vingtième Siècle and was strongly influenced by the outlet’s editor, ultra-conservative abbot Norbert Wallez. He was also close to Léon Degrelle, founder of Belgium’s fascist Rex party and a Nazi sympathiser; Hergé never disavowed the friendship, which continued after the war. Certainly, Hergé wasn’t as politically naive as Tintin. “In the 1930s he was a rexist [a supporter of the Rex party], there’s no doubt about it,” says Bernière, who also points out that Hergé worked under German supervision for the paper Le Soir while Belgium was under Nazi occupation.

His first albums bear all the hallmarks of the political environment they were conceived in. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, published in 1930, is an anti-communist propaganda book for children: the Bolsheviks burn bundles of straw inside empty factories so that the smoke can fool visitors about the country’s productivity; a poll held at gunpoint inevitably results in the pro-regime list being elected with 100 per cent of the vote. Tintin in the Congo, written the following year, is an anthology of racial and colonial stereotypes. The locals are portrayed as lazy and uneducated, and only young white man Tintin can lift them from their pitiful state. Hergé also pandered to the worst antisemitic prejudices, such as in an early version of the 1942 story The Shooting Star, which featured two grotesquely villainous Jews.