309. Tintin, Nazis, & Soviets

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. Last episode, we were talking about cartoon characters, and we're going to talk about a proper doozy in this one. So we talked about Baba the Elephant and Asterix. It is that thing that we have so often on Empire, where two things are true simultaneously. And Baba the Elephant is enormously charming, and we all love those pictures, but it is also enormously offensive to many people at the same time. And trying to keep both those visions in the same pair of binoculars is a tricky thing, isn't it? Well, I mean, I was really interested in your response to pictures that you had seen and accepted as a child.

1:08And now you were going, oh, my God. Never occurred to me growing up in 1970s sort of semi-Edwardian Scotland that any of the stuff was at all dodgy. But yes, no, I totally see it now. Anyway, look, we continue the discussion, but we're talking about Tintin. Dantau, if you're on the other side of the channel. And it's a cracker of a story that you've uncovered, Anita. I have to say, this is Anita's research, not mine, this episode. And it is one of the most extraordinary stories we've ever dealt with. So onto it. It's great. Thank you so much. Well, if you thought there was controversy surrounding the other two characters that we did last week, nothing compared to this one, which is a bit of a hurricane.

1:41So for those of you who don't know Tintin, the character is very simply drawn. You know, just a round head, two dots for eyes, two little semicircles for eyebrows. He has this blonde quiff, which is really the Tintin style, and blue jumper, khaki trouser combo, usually. And in a nutshell, you know, he's this sort of intrepid journalist who gets pulled into all sorts of daring do. He has a dog called Snowy. They travel around the world solving mysteries, uncovering conspiracies, looking for treasure. And you might recognise some of the side characters. Captain Haddock. I love Captain Haddock. The sea dog.

2:17There's a bit of Captain Haddock about you, actually. Thank you very much. Certainly a fondness for rum would certainly be. He's a bon vivant. As well as Haddock, you've got eccentric Professor Calculus, who's sort of the brains of the operation. So these books were written between 1929 and 1976, which is a great span of history. And the adventures also take you across a huge span of the world, you know, from the jungles of South America to the moon even. And they had an impact on you as a child. I mean, were these one of your favourites? So bizarrely, while I grew up with Asterix and he was something that was very much around from my nursery days, Tintin was something that seemed enormously sophisticated and other boys knew about when I went to school.

3:01And I remember trading sort of Sweeties and North Berwick Rock, which is what I used to appear at school with from Scotland, this chewy sweet that they made on the seaside at home, for the loan of Tintin and the Golden Claws or something like that. Other boys had these books at school and they were new to me. And I remember thinking they were very sophisticated and exciting that I didn't know about them when I went to school. A lot of people did, because let me tell this is one of the most successful, widely distributed comic series of all time. So let's run through some of the stats for you, first of all.

3:33It's been translated into 110 languages and dialects. Over 270 million copies have been sold worldwide. That's a lot of copies, isn't it? I mean, and those are only figures from 2019. That's the latest I could find. Got to be more now. Estimates suggest that up to a billion people have read Tintin to date worldwide. And just tell us about how much these pictures go for, William, because it's eye-watering. Well, if you look on auctioneer websites, the artwork for Le Lotus Bleu, which was originally rejected as too expensive to reproduce in 1936 and kept in a drawer, the editor's son found it and sold it in 2021 for£2.3 million.

4:17So check your bottom drawers, anyone who's got parents that worked in publishing houses, because you never know. Yeah, there be treasure. And two years later, another drawing, Tintin in America, which was created back in 1942, it was used for the colour edition of the Belgian artist's 1946 book, which had the same name, sold just shy of£2 million. So these things are worth a lot of money. Did you grow up on also the cartoon version? because I remember then later in my childhood that there was a cartoon strip that was on in the holidays in the morning, which was, again, a whole new Tintin on TV, which is very exciting.

4:52I didn't. So do you know why I didn't particularly warm to Tintin? Because it was all about boys, all only boys. There were no strong girl characters at all. There was. There was the opera singer. Do you remember the wonderful opera singer? No, I don't, actually. But I do remember the sort of boys club going off and getting into trouble, with the Thompson Twins, who we didn't mention for particular favourites of yours. I did, however, watch the Tintin film. That was released in 2011. And boy, what a hefty powerhouse of Hollywood they had behind that. So that was directed by Steven Spielberg. He produced it with Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame.

5:28John Williams composed the music. And that grossed around£250 million at the box office. That's how I guess they reached this estimate of$1 billion for this. And what is really extraordinary about this is that they were savvy. So the creator's widow, Hergé, as he is known, and we'll get into the name of him because that's really interesting as well, she controls the commercial exploitation of Tintin. So that is memorabilia, licensing, merchandising, museum-related business. This is like J.K. Rowling's business manager, exactly, who from the beginning, didn't they? They snapped up the rights to every sort of little plastic Harry Potter that ever was produced, very cleverly.

6:09I mean, it's smart. But let's tell you about Hergé, because the world knows him as Hergé. Tintin is Hergé's child. But actually, the name of the creator was Georges Rémy. Georges Rémy. I had no idea about that either. I mean, Hergé has been so much a name since my childhood, I had no idea he was called something completely different. It's made up. So it is actually his initials. So Georges Rémy, G-R, G-R, reversed, is Hergé. So he was born in Belgium. What would be our French cartoon names? I would be B.W. Ah-ah, ah-ah, which is strangely the predominant noise I heard from my mother growing up.

6:47Ah-ah, ah-ah. Anyway, look, he had a very humble beginning, Didier-J. His dad worked in a sweetie factory. His mum was a stay-at-home housewife. And school reports always talked about him doodling rather than paying attention. And it was probably just, you know, the only thing he could do was go to art college. Supposedly, this would have been the exact right place for him, but he hated it. He didn't like to be told what to draw. And from a very young age, A.R.J. was completely sucked in by adventure stories. He loved talking about Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle.

7:25These were his favorites. These were his seminal works. And there was something about how they made his little world in Belgium grow bigger. and he channeled that and something in that middle class dreamer also touched a nerve with the readers. He also said, actually, the Boy Scouts movement was a huge influence on him. So he said it erased the boredom of childhood and it gave him all the time to draw these comics, these little characters. And he came up quite early with this character called Totor, who looks a little bit like Tintin. He was in a Belgium edition of the official Boy Scouts magazine, which he was sort of, you know, so right from the start, It's like he's destined to birth this character.

8:05Was Toto an influence on Tintin? He looks a lot like Tintin. Must have been. So what I hadn't realized, and what was so interesting reading about this, is the actually very sort of right-wing Catholic background to the early Tintin stories. And in October 1925, at the age of 18, Hergé joins the Le XXe siècle, which is a kind of right-wing Catholic newspaper published by the Société Nouvelle, headed by a sort of Fundo Catholic priest called Norbert Wallace. And he moved up the scale in the office from Erin Boyd, illustrator, and then reporter, photographer. So in a sense, Hergé was the original Tintin, but in a slightly more sort of dodgy background than we realized.

8:52And in 1929, Hergé creates his first real balloon comic with Les Aventures de Tintin, The Adventures of Tintin, which ran in Le Petit Vintième, a young person's supplement to the paper. And this is commissioned by Father Norbert, who is this, as I said, this sort of ultra-conservative Catholic. And it was like those sort of early CIA propaganda books that were distributed across the Soviet Union. It was actually Tintin au pays de la soviete, so Tintin in the land of the Soviets. and he's uncovering sort of Marxist propaganda. And this is all meant to be sort of consumed by nice Belgian kids to see the errors of communism.

9:34Right from the start, you get the impression that, you know, his editorial is controlled by this man called Norbert Wallets. And Norbert really does want to run down things he doesn't like from children's earliest, most pliable minds. So, you know, he's the one who wants to have this anti-Soviet propaganda. And this is all sort of, you know, staged elections, factories run only when foreign visitors are present, violence against dissenters. All of this is kind of woven into the comic strip as well. Just to make clear, this is not a sort of distant cousin of our familiar Tintin or Tintin. This is absolutely the Tintin we know and love with a little quiff of hair.

10:13He's already there with his doggie Snowy working against baddies in caps. But they are Soviet baddies and it is anti-communist propaganda. So let me tell you the story of this first foray of Tintin into the world. So Tintin and Snowy are being chased. They are arrested. They escape multiple times. The Soviet secret police or the OGPU, they are stupid in this. They're not very clever. They're not very good. It stands for, by the way, OGPU, the Joint State Political Directorate, if you really want to know. So they were the really terrifying secret Soviet intelligence agency from about 1923 to 1934, a real thing.

10:51So, you know, a precursor to the dreaded NKVD. And the magazine goes down so well with Norbert, Father Norbert, that he decides, actually, you know what, this is going to be a real thing. He sees what this little kid in his office has produced and he says, right, OK, you know what, marketing, that's what we're going to do. So he hires an actor and a dog that looks like Snowy to wander around Brussels, dressed like Tintin and his dog, to publicise this newly born comic. And it works a treat. Tintin pretty much becomes an overnight sensation. If Algier minded being used by his editor, you know, for political propaganda, he didn't show it.

11:26I mean, you know, he's young, I suppose he just feels lucky to be there. How old is Algier at this point? 18 when he starts working for the paper. So it's like a couple of years later. So really, of course he is. Money in his pocket. They're sending out adverts for him. It's like having, if you've got a book published, seeing your poster on the underground is thrilling. So the next commission is another piece of propaganda. For this second installment, Hergé had wanted to send Tintin to the United States. But Father Norbert said, no, no, no. I think what we do is why don't we send Tintin and Snowy to the Belgian colony of Congo instead?

12:04Which, as we know from our Conrad episode last week with the wonderful Maya Jasnov, was in many ways the worst European colony of all, an absolute horror story. And here is Tintin doing active propaganda for the Belgian Congo, albeit a little bit later than the kind of real horror times of the early 1900s and 1920s. So tell us about Tanta Okongo, Anita. Well, I mean, look, the takeaway message from it is colonials, great missionaries, fabulous, and the local black population, savages. So this was like a great civilising mission. That's what Father Norbert had wanted to convey. And the images, you just need to take a look at the images from the time.

12:48I mean, they weren't out of place at the time, but now if we look at them, so you've got sort of one, you've got a missionary in a boat with Snowy and Tintin. With a cross around his neck, a pith helmet and a Father Christmas beard. Basically, the biggest stereotype of missionary you can imagine. But rowing the boat are six black sort of servants, I guess. With enormous lips. They're the ultimate stereotype. Sickening, slightly sickening, actually. Absolutely. And just to recap, if you haven't heard brilliant Maya Jasnoff, go back and listen. Belgium at the time was ruling over the Congo Free State, later to become the Belgian Congo.

13:25And these attitudes towards black people were widely accepted, not just in Belgian society, but in wider Europe. So whereas, you know, if you were a kid, you open the book, you'll see like an exciting children's adventure. But this stuff sort of seeps in underneath. You know, it's paternalistic. The white people are the ones who are, you know, making all the decisions, having all the agency. And the Congolese characters are nothing. And just think about what was actually going on at the time in Belgian Congo, because you have King Leopold II, who has claimed the Congo at the Berlin Conference from 1884 to 1885.

14:03He says, look, this is going to be a humanitarian philanthropic project. We're going to civilize Africans, even saying, you know, we're going to suppress the slave trade, which is an African thing. But in reality, what this was was a private economic enterprise designed to extract, extract, extract, especially ivory. And then later in the 1890s, it would turn to rubber, which was in high demand. And, you know, this was the actual politics and experiences of those there. And just to, again, we said a little of this last week with the Conrad episode, what was going on was that if individual villages did not produce their quota of rubber and ivory, there was extreme violence, hostage taking, or what we would probably call terrorism.

14:46Entire communities were destroyed and burnt down. And the most visible symbol of this was the cutting off of hands, which is extraordinary. I'm looking now at photographs of some guys who've had their left hand cut off with a machete. These are the children of the workers. If quotas weren't met often, children were netted up and their limbs were cut off. One of the images that you're looking at is a child of about 10 years old who's missing a hand. And this is not done by mercenaries without the knowledge of the colonial officials, because in one of the photographs, we have a colonial official in a white pith helmet, like the missionary in the cartoon.

15:29And he is sitting there in a beautifully starched white imperial suit. And he's pointing at the hand of the person who's had his hand cut off at the stump. And this is produced as an advert or a warning, or is it proud colonial official showing folks back home what he's been doing in his spare time? It's a grotesque picture. And there's not just one or two of them. There are lines of these pictures of kids of 10. There are so many of these pictures of atrocity. And if you look at the numbers, they're not going to make you feel any better than the images, which will rock you to your root. Because it's suggested the Congo's population fell by 10 million or more, which is roughly half the population during Leopold's war, due to not just these kind of maimings, killings, famine, forced labor, disease.

16:15So these are absolutely appalling times. And news is getting out. And actually, we portrayed the missionary in the Béodot -Éreux indeed. But some missionaries were appalled by this. So you have travelers and reformers who are coming there. Missionaries are sending their statements back saying, these are the kids who are turning up to our missions. This is what's happening. Edie Morrell, who's a French-born British journalist, he's an author, he's a pacifist, he's there. He's sending scathing remarks back. Sir Roger Casement, you remember we talked about him? This extraordinary character, yeah.

16:48He appeared in our Irish series. Yeah, I mean, we talked about Roger Casement in the Ireland episodes, diplomat, Irish nationalist who eventually gets executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I and thrown into an unmarked grave at the back of Pentonville Prison. They are putting on the pressure on Belgium, saying, you know what, you cannot do this. You are the king and this is all being done in your name. And it's thanks to pressure from people like Casement that King Leopold then ends up ceding control to the Belgian state in 1908. But you know what? Things don't get better, do they?

17:21So this cartoon is being drawn in 1934 when things are a little better than they were during the limb-cutting bonanza of what was about the 1910s. It's still absolutely the worst of all European colonies. It's always recognised as such. And the Belgian state control becomes more regulated, but it's still unbelievably harsh condition in the mines, especially copper and diamonds, uranium, all these sort of things, claiming hundreds of lives. And there's racial segregation in the cities, strict control over movement and labor. And this is the model colony which Hergé, in one of his earliest incarnations, is drawing propaganda for, effectively.

18:01Even so, his comic book carries on being very popular. He has huge success. Congo gets independence from the Belgians in 1960. And so all of this is then out and discussed and in the public domain. He does reflect about it after, you know, sort of this huge slurry of images and reportage becomes public after the Belgians finally leave. And in 1975, he actually does a series of interviews with a journalist called Numa Sadul, which, you know, look up because they're really fascinating. He's asked about those early successes, including Tintin in the Congo, which put him on the map, you know, decades before.

18:43And he says, look, this is a direct quote. I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me. It was 1930, and I drew them in the purely paternalistic spirit that was that of the time in Belgium. And he acknowledged in those interviews that the work reflected the prejudices of the time, rather than any understanding he had of Africa. And he asked for forgiveness. He said, look, this is a youthful sin. I'm sorry about the colonial stereotypes. And he also did talk in those interviews about being used in anti-Soviet propaganda. But these are the ones that A.R. Shea talked about.

19:17There are others that maybe I would like to ask him about. There are some others. William, tell us about Timton in America, which he draws in 1932. Well, yeah, it goes on. And again, you know, it's very difficult to know how to react to this because do you just say this is the prejudices of the time, but what he's drawing in Tinted America, of course, is red Indians committing savageries. And by red Indians, in inverted commas, we mean guys in wigwams with feather headdresses doing, in inverted commas, native dances. And yeah, it's all very primitive and savage. That's the only word for it. This is 1932, though.

19:54Let's cut him a break with that. This is the same period as those black and white movies where hundreds of Indians are being shot dead by sort of early John Wayne characters and that sort of thing. So give him that. But then something changes, even before the 1960s and 1970s, when you have the civil rights movement and you have all this evidence coming out from historians about what actually happens in these places. But something happens that makes his next work, The Blue Lotus, the one that William was talking about, you know, that image that was found in the editor's son's drawer that sold for 2.3 million.

20:25Something happens that changes his mind, and it is so human and rather touching. Join us after the break and we'll tell you about it.

20:37Welcome back. So, in 1936, what happens to the Blue Lotus? Give you a little synopsis. The story begins with Tintin in India, where he receives a mysterious invitation to China from a stranger connected to a secret opium smuggling ring. And Tintin arrives in Shanghai. He finds himself caught up in the middle of political tensions between China and Japan. These things were happening. Japan is preparing to invade China. Propaganda is being used to justify that action in Europe. But Tintin learns that the drug smuggling is linked to a Shanghai opium den called the Blue Lotus and a dangerous poison.

21:15This poison is called, is it rajaja juice? And it's being used to drive people insane. Now, what happens? And this is the lovely sort of human happenchance Anita referred to, that while investigating, Tintin is befriended by a young Chinese boy named Chang Chong Chen. And their friendship becomes this very sort of touching aspect of the series, especially when Tintin protects Chang from racism and bullying. And together they uncover the truth, a sinister conspiracy involving corrupt officials, Japanese spies and an international drug cartel. And in the end, Tintin manages to expose the criminals, dismantle the opium operation, help the Chinese resist Chinese manipulation.

21:55And the story closes with Tintin and Chang parting as close friends, promising to see each other again. So the question is, how come that we get this very different sort of racial spin? Anita, tell us. Oh, it's so exciting. Okay, so it is because of one man, a man called Zhang Chongren, who is a young Chinese man who will change Herjie's brain. So born in 1907, this young man, Zhang Chongren, is raised in a Jesuit orphanage in old Shanghai. And he will become one of the greatest sculptors of his age. I mean, they refer to him even now as the Rodin of the East. In fact, just to give you a sense of how important he is to the art world, in the mid-1980s, French cultural authorities made a cast of his hands.

22:41That is an honor they only bestowed on Rodin himself and Pablo Picasso. So, cut back to when he's actually sort of nothing, just a young man. It's the 1930s. News has started leaking out that Hergé, who's now like a superstar cartoonist, is going to set his next work in China. And at that same time, it just so happens that Zhang Zhauren has travelled to Brussels and is studying as an art student. And he is in the care of a Jesuit priest called Father Leon Gosset, who's the chaplain for Chinese students at the University of Levin, where Zhang has come to further his studies. I should say quickly that my priest brother also studied at the University of Levin in his priestly formation, I think they call it.

23:24Oh, there's always a Dalrymple somewhere. you just have to scratch the surface. Gosse, who is looking after these Chinese students, is a little bit worried because Hergé is like this phenomenon. And he's worried about the impact of the kind of stories and the kind of pictures that Hergé produces. What will they do to the people that he loves, his Chinese students? So, you know, he says, look, I'm going to write to him. I'm going to tell him because I'm worried that Hergé might treat the Chinese the same way he treated the natives of the Congo. Because they were very popular with his students, He saw them reading A.J.

23:57comics and wanted him to be properly informed. Well, he just didn't want his Chinese students to be heard. So he writes to A.J. and to A.J.'s credit, he writes back. And he says, you know what, Father Gosset, if you're really upset about it, the best thing you can do, and this is a quote, is find me a Chinese advisor. So that's what Gosset does. He introduces A.J. to several Chinese students in Levin and finally to Zhang himself. And the date is May 1934. 1934. And at this time, Zhang, who's only a year younger than Alge, he's 26 at this time. And he's doing very well in art. And Alge, of course, he loved art.

24:35Art was his slipstream into drawing cartoons. And he visits Alge at his home every Sunday throughout the year of 1934. And he starts to talk to him about Eastern art. He teaches Alge calligraphy. He teaches in the basics of Taoist philosophy. They talk about Chinese current affairs and the culture. And Zhang can talk to him because he's fluent in French. He's been raised in this sort of Jesuit tradition, so he's bilingual. And so you can see this impact on E.R.J.'s work. Because if you look at the cartoon strip, The Blue Lotus, there are Chinese phrases in the background of the comic strip, like little hidden messages or little strokes to his friend's face written out by Zhang.