Ideology of Tintin - First Albums

First Albums

The first Tintin book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was crafted on the orders of Hergé's superiors, to be anti-Soviet propaganda of limited outlook. Nonetheless, Hergé worked willingly: "I was sincerely convinced of being on the right path", he said later. His only source was Moscou sans voiles ("Moscow without veils"), a book written in 1928 by Joseph Douillet, former consul of Belgium in the USSR. In this book, appearing not much more than a decade after the October Revolution, Douillet denounced the communist system for producing poverty, famine, and terror. The secret police maintained order and the propaganda deceived foreigners. Nonetheless, the anti-totalitarian theme of this first book would persist throughout the series.

Hergé wanted the second book to take place in the United States, which fascinated him. Wallez disagreed: he distrusted the USA, the country of Protestantism, liberalism, of easy money, and of gangsters. Instead, he asked Hergé to draw a book about the Belgian Congo: the colony needed white workers at the time.

Tintin in the Congo reflected the dominant colonialist ideology at that time. As put by Hergé in a later interview, "This was in 1930. All I knew about the Congo was what people were saying about it at the time: 'The Negroes are big children, it's fortunate for them that we're there, etc'".

The paternalistic description of the indigenous people of Belgian Congo was more naive than racist, and Hergé developed an important theme of Tintin in this book: international trafficking.