Tintin Forums

This article got me thinking:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/hollywood-censors-its-animated-cart oons-1939

Presumably Hergé had to get Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock and the rest of the gang past the censors in order to publish the stories.
We know the Captain's swearing had to be curtailed, hence the creation of his unique brand of curses.
Strangely, although Tintin is made a teetotaller by Crab with the Golden Claws, the Captain seems to be OK to drink to excess, provided he brings the comedy while he's about it.

Does anybody know what criteria were used by the Belgian censors?
Are there any extant scenes that were cut by the censors?

castafiole
Does anybody know what criteria were used by the Belgian censors?

I've never read anything about a board of censors who went through the books with a blue pencil; I think Hergé mostly self-censored himself.

Are there any extant scenes that were cut by the censors?
But there's a few instances I can find where people objected to some of the contents.

The Catholic Church didn't agree with Wolff's sacrifice in Explorers on the Moon and demanded that Hergé insert, "Perhaps by some miracle I shall escape too" into his farewell note. The vignette on the title page of The Seven Crystal Balls originally depicted Rascar Capac brandishing a crystal ball, but it was considered too terrifying for children so Haddock and the cow-head replaced it.
There's the replacement page in Tintin in the Congo which I think only appears in the English and Swedish editions. Hergé also modified the Africans' dialogue in the French edition of The Red Sea Sharks, but the English translation retains the original text.

There were some changes made for various publications - the panel on the penultimate page of The Broken Ear showing the devils was replaced by one depicting Tintin in a blanket murmuring "Dieu ait leur âme!" ("God rest their souls!") for Coeurs Vaillants.

Well, maybe I'm wrong on this.
I just figure there had to have been censors for the magazines within which Tintin was published.
Casterman's site mentions nothing that I can see about censorship or anything of the sort, but I imagine there had to have been some kind of vetting process to get these books to print?

Or am I showing my North American roots in thinking Hergé had to please the censors?

The Catholic Church didn't agree with Wolff's sacrifice in Explorers on the Moon.

I don't see why. I'm a strong Christian and I don't see self-sacrifice as dishonourable, infact it's a beautiful thing. Maybe they thought it was suicide. There is a huge difference.

Well I don't think Haddock's curses come from a desire for Hergé to stick lots of swearing in his book but I understand your meaning!

He added the extra line in Explorers about Wolff maybe surviving, suicide being a mortal sin.

I don't believe books have censors do they (well nothing like the BBFC film censors for movies); if they were there at all, it would have been in-house, and for the most part Hergé would have been aware of what he was writing.

R

Yeah, Tintinrulz, the one unforgiveable sin in the Catholic Church is suicide, so I can understand that the Church had a problem with Frank Wolff's sacrifice.

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree, and it's more societal strictures that goverened what Hergé did or did not write.

I was thinking about why, for example, there are few female characters of any importance in the series. I wondered if depicting a single, female, *serious* character (as opposed to Castafiore, who was supposed to be a figure of ridicule) would have been a no-no in a book full of bachelors.

Or maybe it's a simple as Hergé figuring books with such a character in them wouldn't sell?

The same might be said for the swearing thing - Hergé could have just as easily put in "dingbat" swearing, but perhaps mothers buying such books for their sons would have objected and bought another title instead?

Actually, the unforgiveable sin in Catholicism is "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit", for which there is no absolution, now or in the next life; suicide would be classed a mortal sin (literally "a sin leading to death"), as Rik says above, but technically he could ask for, and recieve, absolution... but that's probably not the point you were making... :-)

The Captain's swearing didn't have to be "curtailed" - it was created to reflect a type of "swearing" that Hergé himself had heard!
During it's imperial years, the Belgian rulers used colonial wealth to undertake massive building projects in Brussels - including the National Basillica and the Palais de Justice, two of a proposed five (I think) enormous buildings for the capital; famously, however, the Belgian Empire also didn't last very long, and the money and appetite for the projects petered out. The Basillica was eventualy finished (it's well worth a visit, it's stunning inside, and has amazing roof-terraces for looking out over the city), but the Palais de Justice is *still* incomplete, and is now so old that the *scaffolding* which remains around it has been certified as a protected historic monument.
To make matters worse, the Palais, which sits on a specially constructed mound, was given its space by the compulsory purchase and destruction of much of the Marolle quarter of the city, a working-class area where Hergé's granny lived, and which provided the dialect that Hergé loved to use in creating the names of places and people in his books. So unpopular was the project that the word arkitek! ("architect") entered the Brussels lexicon as a swear-word, to be used to express frustration.
This was not a unique occurence, and Hergé recounted an incident to Numa Sadoul from the early thirties, in which a market-seller and client were having an argument, which he over-heard; it was at the time of the Four-Power Pact (or Quadripartite Agreement, to give it its fancy name), a treaty between Britain, France, Italy, and Nazi Germany; this was known as the "Pacte-à-Quatre" in French. Anyway, the stall-holder was probably losing the argument, but in trying to fight back, shouted at the customer: "Espèce de Pacte-à-Quatre que vous êtes!" (so, "You Four-Power-Pact, you!") - which appeared to strike the necessary winning blow, but meant absolutey nothing, it just sounded impressive! Hergé thought it was brilliantly funny, and filed it away until he needed to give equally pointless outbursts to his captain.


Hergé chose this means of representing swearing because it is funny, and forever evolving into ever greater heights of baroque vocabulary; I wouldn't lay it at the door of censors. He chose words for how they sounded, and how they made him laugh.

If it hadn't been an opportunity for comedy and character evolvement in the Captain, I don't think Hergé would ever have put it in.

Really I think you have to see it in light of Hergé being someone who knew what he wished to achieve, and to whom he was aiming his work - so there wasn't any great need to have censorship applied, as he wasn't courting controversy in the first place, and little that he did would have been questioned at the time.

This is why incidents such as Wolffe's actions stand out, because it was such a rare occurence (as I have said elsewhere, the morals and ethics aside, I think the addition of the absolutely futile suggestion that Wolff might somehow survive actually improves the poignancy of his actions, and seems more true to the character, so it could be that the "censorship" was an improvement...