Tintin in the dock

He is the most famous Belgian ever, although the French have done their best to annexe him. Now, 70 years after he first appeared, Tintin...

He is the most famous Belgian ever, although the French have done their best to annexe him. Now, 70 years after he first appeared, Tintin 8212; or rather his creator, Herge 8212; is the subject of intense political debate: was he a racist and a collaborator? All kinds of people have wanted to be associated with Tintin. Leon Degrelle, the founder of Belgium8217;s fascist party and the leader of its wartime SS division, had the temerity to claim: 8220;Tintin, c8217;est moi!8221;

8220;The Forbidden History8221; screams L8217;Evenement du Jeudi in Paris. The normally sober Figaro has solicited the views of po-faced politicians, writers and historians on l8217;affaire Tintin. And, to cap it all, on Wednesday some 60 Tintinophile deputies of the Assemble Nationale in France will gather to address the burning question of the hour: is Tintin a man or, rather, boy of the left or the right?

This, of course, has set the cat among the Belgian pigeons. Whatever the French might like to think, Tintin remains, indisputably, Belgium8217;s national hero.Not so, says Pierre Assouline, editor of Lire, a French literary magazine: Tintin is a European, par excellence. Assouline is the author of a best-selling biography of Tintin8217;s creator, Georges Remi, whose inverted initials, RG, in their French pronunciation, gave him his pseudonym, Herge. There are people who devote their entire free time to studying the minutiae of Tintin8217;s life. But the debate that revolves around Herge himself, 16 years after his death, is even more fevered. Indeed, to listen to his detractors, you might think that the man had been a fully-fledged, goose-stepping Nazi. His defenders, however, present a good-natured old cove who happened to commit the odd youthful indiscretion.

When Tintin8217;s whirl around the Soviet Union was over on May 8, 1930, Tintin was despatched to the Congo, Belgium8217;s vast imperial possession. To our eyes, the strip is crude, full of racist caricatures. More than 40 years later, Herge called this book, along with the Soviets, a 8220;sin of youth8221;.It was at theoffices of the right-wing Vingtieme Siecle that Herge came to know Leon Degrelle, a young journalist, who, at the age of 22, reported from Mexico on the massacre of Catholic priests. Back in Belgium, Degrelle penned a political pamphlet in 1932 for which Herge drew the cover. Two years later, Degrelle founded the Belgian fascist party, Rex.

Today, we know where all this was to end. But Huibrecht van Opstal, author of a study of Herge, says that in the early Thirties Rex was still just a publishing house, fascism something Italian, 8220;the swastika a symbol familiar to scouting, and Adolf Hitler, principally, someone who made one think of the comic cinema of Charlie Chaplin8221;.