Herge and the Nazis

An exclusive extract from Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline.

Chapter 6: The Golden Age, 1940-1944

To Hergé, the king was the personification of Belgian resistance, and it was in that light he understood the speech given by Léopold III the day after the surrender. The war was over, the Germans occupied the country; horrible as it was, the situation could not last forever. In other words, let’s be practical and adapt while waiting for better times. “That was why,” Hergé said later in an interview, “I had no scruples about working with a newspaper such as Le Soir.”

This spirit of compromise also marked the first step on the path to passive collaboration. From the start Hergé had wanted to stay in print under the Occupation. The crisis of conscience that had led some of his colleagues to “break their pens,” so to speak, was alien to him. “I worked, period; that’s all. Just like a miner works, or a streetcar ticket taker, or a baker. While everyone found it normal that a mechanic made trains run, they thought that people of the press were supposedly traitors.” He objected to the very idea that writers and journalists should be more responsible. His attitude revealed denial, which in turn masked an unstated emotion. During the Occupation, a number of friends from his youth had attained positions of power in the press. From Hergé’s perspective, there was no reason he should deprive himself of working with them. Politically there was no great gap between them and him. The Germans had to leave someday. Le Vingtième Siècle was shut down for good. Remi waited four months before the Occupation Authority would lift the sequestration and he get at the money the paper owed him and settle his taxes. Fortunately for him, Casterman was late in settling its accounts and advanced him 10,000 francs (current equivalent, $3,300).

There were now three categories of newspapers: those that continued to publish under their own initiative (a total of eleven); those that appeared for the first time (nine); and those labeled “stolen” because they had been confiscated and published against the will of their owners or board of directors (thirteen).

By the end of summer 1940, Hergé had come to an agreement with the Flemish press of Belgium, Het Algemeen Nieuws, for exclusive rights to “Quick and Flupke,” and with Het Laatste Nieuws (a stolen paper) for exclusive rights to Tintin. Against the advice of Casterman, he chose to publish a volume of “Quick and Flupke” rather than Popol and Virginia in the Country of the Lapinos, which involved arms dealers—“innocuous in normal times,” as he put it, “but these days could cause us problems if not the outright refusal of permission to publish.” Hergé also approached Le Nouveau Journal, a new daily of questionable merit that was launched in October 1940 with the team from the weekly Cassandre. It was under the direction of Paul Colin, a collaborator, whom Hergé described as “a first rate man, very sympathetic.”

The Belgian press under the German Occupation was in a paradoxical position: it was read, but not believed. Although the papers were too servile to have any credibility, people nevertheless bought them and devoured every line. Despite the logistical problems of printing and distribution, newspapers had roughly the same circulation as before the war. The hardships of life transformed people into avid readers. They consumed everything, books or pamphlets, yet without surrendering judgment. The majority listened to the BBC, which reestablished the balance, corrected errors of point of view, and removed any doubts about the origin of specific information. A great mistake of the occupiers was not to have confiscated all radio sets, as they had in the Netherlands.

Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline is a brand new biography being launched this week in the UK and in the USA in a couple of week’s times. Published by Oxford University Press. It is available on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com.

Text (c) Pierre Assouline and used with permission.
Tintin is a registered trademark of Moulinsart, who are not associated with this book or this blog.