Hergé was not French, he was Francophone Belgian, and it was Belgian authorities that attacked him as a collaborator. Oops... srry.
Five days after the liberation of Brussels, on 8 September 1944, the now free newspapers in Belgium published the following notice, by order of the Allied Command: "All members of the editorial staff of a newspaper during the Occupation are now forbidden to practice their profession."
Georges Rémi, aka Hergé, like all journalists and artists who had contributed to newspapers, was among the blacklisted. On 3 September, the day of the liberation, Hergé was arrested by members of the resistance, who carried a list of 40 journalists with their pictures, names, adresses, and resumés:
Dear readers, look at these faces! Vice is written on these faces. All commentary is unnecessary; these people's crimes are known. The punishment that we will exact from them is merciless.
Hergé was listed twice, under his real name and under his artist name. He was set free, but arrested three other times in the following weeks, by different organizations, and set free again, though he spent one night in prison, where he met other collaborationist journalists. A Resistance newspaper published a crudely drawn strip called Les aventures de Tintin et Milou au Pays des Nazis (The adventures of Tintin and Snowy in the land of the Nazis) where Tintin was presented as a resistance fighter and Hergé called a Nazi sympathizer.
Hergé's career before the war had been closely associated to the right-wing nationalist and catholic circles, through his work as a cartoonist for the Vingtième Siècle and its weekly supplement for the youth, the Petit Vingtième. Though most of his work was apolitical, he created the anticommunist Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929-1930), and he was in friendly terms with far-right journalist Léon Degrelle, his colleague at the Vingtième Siècle, and produced for him a couple of anticommunist posters. Still, the Blue Lotus (1934) sides with Chinese people threatened by the Japanese (and offers a surprisingly frank and refreshing discussion of cultural stereotypes) and, in King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938-1939), Tintin foils the invasion plans of a villainous dictator called "Müssler". Meanwhile, at the Vingtième Siècle, Hergé's friend Paul Jamin edited columns spouting "anti-Communist, anticapitalist, anti-Semitic, antiparliamentarian, and antiliberal" opinions, and occasionally praising Mussolini or the Nazis (Assouline, 1998).
In 1940, Belgium was invaded and the Vingtième Siècle was shut down. Some of the newspapers were confiscated and published under the close surveillance of the German propaganda services. This was the case of Le Soir, one of Belgium's major newspaper (Belgians called it the "stolen" Soir). Hergé was contacted by the collaborationist management of Le Soir and was hired.
Despite the hardships of the war, this was a period of intense creativity for Hergé, who thrived in this new environment. This is when he wrote several Tintin classics: The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941, introducing captain Haddock), The Shooting Star (1941-1942), and the diptych The Secret of the Unicorn (1942-1943) and Red Rackham's Treasure (1943-1944, introducing professor Calculus and Marlinspike Hall). The stories, first serialized in Le Soir and then published in book form - and in colour - by Casterman, were extremely successful, so much that Hergé once had to intervene personally with the Occupation Authority to help Casterman to obtain the necessary quota of paper. Hergé sold 324,000 Tintin books during the war, versus 34,000 in 1939.
Unlike the prewar Tintin comics, which had alluded to, or were inspired by real world events, these new works were fully escapist. They were also politically neutral, except for The Shooting Star: in the 1941 version, the villains are Americans and the main antagonist is a Jewish banker called Blumenstein (later renamed Bohlwinkel), drawn as a traditional antisemitic caricature, with a big nose and thick lips. When the comic book was first serialized in the stolen Soir, it also included a drawing where two Jews named Isaac and Salomon, speaking with a heavily Eastern European accent, congratulate each other because the end of the world will save them from paying their suppliers (the drawing was dropped when the comic was published in book form). For good measure, the seaplane used by Tintin in the Shooting Star is an Arado 196, a German war plane. Six days after the end of the serial, wearing the yellow star became mandatory for Belgian Jews, and deportations to the death camps started a few months later.
Le Soir was run by far-right nationalist Raymond De Becker, who had switched to the fascist Rex Party funded by Léon Degrelle (who later joined the Waffen-SS). It was a collaborationist newspaper that praised the Occupation and published antisemitic articles. At the end of 1943, De Becker, who had hinted in public that he would be open to change sides now that the defeat of Germany seemed possible, was expelled from Le Soir and put under house arrest by German authorities. Hergé nevertheless remained at the stolen Soir, even after a friend warned him that collaborationists would be in trouble when the Allies eventually liberated Belgium. He started working on his next diptych The seven crystal balls, which was being serialized in September 1944.
And then Belgium was free. Hergé, the prominent, successful cartoonist of the stolen Soir was among the accused. He became overnight one of the much despised, hated inciviques, the Belgian word for those who were suspected of having been poor citizens during the war and who could only reclaim their standing by getting a "certificate of good citizenship". For several months, Hergé was something of a pariah, forbidden from working for the press, though he could still work with Casterman.
The case against him was weak. His prosecutor called him "an inoffensive author and illustrator of children's books". However, Hergé, through his success, had certainly helped the stolen Soir to increase its circulation. His dossier contained letters of denunciation from fellow journalists and editors - those who had refused to work for the collaborationist press - who wished him to be executed. At the trial of Le Soir journalists, some friends and colleagues of Hergé were sentenced to hard labour, or to death, and a few were executed. Some wondered why Hergé was not among the accused: some called him a traitor, an "emboché" (from boche, an anti-German slur):
Must the children of those who were executed and of political prisoners teach common decency to someone who openly exploited the innocent entertainment of children for the benefit of the enemy? Mr. Tintin and your Hitlerjungend, your boss has his place in a cell in Saint-Gilles (La Cité nouvelle, 6-7 July 1946).
Hergé's allies managed to keep him off the courts and to clear his name. One of them was the former Resistance member Raymond Leblanc, who planned to launch the Journal de Tintin magazine with Hergé and needed him to be free. The charges were dropped and Hergé got his "certificate of good citizenship" in May 1946. Personal attacks and accusations of treason continued to hound him for several years.
It is certain that Hergé was not a hardcore collaborationist. There had been the occasional slip-up, such as the antisemitic caricatures in the Shooting Star but, unlike some of his friends like Paul Jamin, he had carefully stayed clear of direct involvement in collaborationist policies, even though he shared some of the political views of his fascist colleagues. His main crime was that he had been, willingly, part of the Belgian systme of collaboration with the Nazis, going along with it, never really questioning it, and he had largely benefited from it, like other artists in France and Belgium. Whether he ever became aware of this is unclear: though he showed some remorse in his later years, he seems to have viewed himself as fully innocent, a victim rather than an accomplice.
According to Assouline:
Like all those who were purged after the war, he gave little thought to the horrors of the war or to what some Belgians had endured during the occupation. He never found the words to denounce the raids, the arrests, imprisonment, torture, and deportations. He never grasped what he was being accused of. When the illustrator Pierre Iclac, a childhood friend who had been hunted by the Gestapo for a whole year, told him that he "was on the other side," Herge replied, "I have to say I don't understand. As for me, I belong on the side of those who work at their profession with the greatest conscientiousness possible, and I honor all the victims of the war, whichever side they are on."
Hergé was not the same after the war. He suffered from bouts of depression, he was disguted with his country, and he even planned to go into exile in Argentina. But in the same time, his immense post-war fame eventually led people to forgot his wartime activities.
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