Ideology of Tintin - Post-war

Post-war

The post-war stories are less controversial, developing several recurring themes:

• Humanism and anti-racism in The Castafiore Emerald, which takes the side of the Roma;

• Totalitarianism: The Calculus Affair is anti-Stalinist, but also shows the lengths to which both sides of the Cold War went to acquire weapons of mass destruction;

• International trafficking and slavery in The Red Sea Sharks;

• Oil multinationals and their influence in Land of Black Gold (and previously in The Broken Ear); and

• The arms trade in The Red Sea Sharks and Flight 714. The millionaire Laszlo Carreidas in Flight 714 is evidently based on French aircraft industrialist Marcel Dassault. As Dassault was born Jewish, the album has been considered as anti-semitic by some, but there is no reference to the religion of Carreidas. In The Broken Ear (before the war), Hergé had already caricatured a real arms merchant, Basil Zaharoff.

In the first edition of The Red Sea Sharks, the black victims speak pidgin French and seem rather simple-minded. Hergé rewrote their dialogue in later editions.

The last controversial album is Tintin and the Picaros, which has been seen both as left-wing and right-wing. In it, Tintin goes through profound changes. For the first time, Tintin seems to be flesh and blood, and perhaps even has weaknesses; for instance, he is at first uncharacteristically unwilling to travel to San Theodoros, where his friends have been falsely accused of espionage. At the end he intervenes dramatically through revolution. But as Benoît Peeters puts it, "it is quite clear that this is no real revolution but a palace coup. Tapioca is backed by Borduria, Alcazar by the International Banana Company; as for ordinary people, they remain impoverished in the shantytowns."