King Ottokar’s Sceptre

"It can be a bit of a cliché to refer to Hergé when talking about Belgium, but it’s difficult to resist him because of the power and wit of some of his early books. I think he becomes less effective by the 1950s. Hergé was a product of a very particular right-wing Catholic journalistic milieu in the 1920s and it is slightly accidental that he is known now for the Tintin books. He was somebody who was producing cartoons and visual material across a whole range of different fields, including getting involved through friends with various extreme-right activities in the 1930s. But he found in his production of Tintin cartoons an outlet for his slightly surreal sense of reality—which is often said to be a characteristic of Belgium. He deliberately adopts seeing the world through a child’s eyes—Tintin’s eyes—which means that he can talk about all sorts of things which would be more difficult to do when you’re using an adult character. That’s certainly true in the case of King Ottokar’s Sceptre which is one of four or five of the Tintin books which really hit home in Belgium. This one hits home because you have lots of amusing stuff at the beginning about Brussels and different sorts of rather foolish intellectuals and scientists. There’s a sense of some sort of fraud being perpetrated but it’s difficult to work out what it is. Then it becomes clear, in the latter half of the book, that it’s about a character called King Ottokar who rules a country called Syldavia which is somewhere in the Balkans. “He found in his production of Tintin cartoons an outlet for his slightly surreal sense of reality—which is often said to be a characteristic of Belgium” But King Ottokar looks and feels like the Belgian king himself—King Leopold III—who had become very controversial within Belgium because of his choices in the war years. He had chosen to seek rapprochement with the German authorities rather than going into exile. So this idea of a slightly martyred king who’s being done down by bad people is something that could be seen very clearly as being an allegory of Belgium at the time. For me, it’s one of the most interesting of the Tintin books— alongside Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Soviet Union —where you can actually see a series of different political messages coming through in the book, while at the same time being just a very successful adventure story that children of all ages enjoy reading. Yes, absolutely. This is about rehabilitating Leopold III as a good king who has fallen victim to malicious plots. That, of course, reflected Hergé’s own view, which was that Leopold III was a splendid person who was being done down by socialist/communist/freemasonic/liberal and even possibly Jewish manipulation. No, I don’t. There is much to say about King Leopold III and I’m not about to contribute to damning his reputation, but clearly a lot of the problem with his supporters—including Hergé—was that they never really took ownership for the mistakes that Leopold had made at various points during his time as monarch. I think the best way of approaching it would be to say that if you decided to have a Sunday lunch with any Belgian family with a fairly long memory and asked them, after a few glasses of wine, what their family thought about King Leopold, you would get a very long and heartfelt response. It’s something that remains a subject of real discussion and debate in Belgian society, even at a time when there are very few people alive who were participants in that debate. Briefly put, Leopold chose to remain in Belgium under German occupation. He sought some sort of alignment with the Germans; he rejected the government in exile which he said he had renounced because it had rejected Belgian neutrality. When the Allies returned to liberate Belgium in 1944, Leopold had been taken off into exile by the Germans. He remained in exile until 1950 when the Catholic government in Belgium decided to bring him back after a referendum—a familiar tool in modern European history—in which 57 per cent of the population had voted for his return. But when he came back, it became clear that the majority was not sufficient to build a basis of support in the country. There was a general strike and the parliamentarians lost their nerve about the whole project. They managed to convince Leopold, very reluctantly, to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, Baudouin, who became king in 1951. But Leopold III didn’t disappear. He remained living quietly in Belgium until his death in 1983. There was always a strong sense of passionate debate about whether this outcome had been the right one."

"Yes, this is a wonderful example. The villain, Müsstler, is a combination of Mussolini and Hitler. King Ottokar’s Sceptre , dating from 1938-39, mirrors the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler. Here we have a small Balkan state, Syldavia, facing the threat of a fascist takeover. Hergé was thinking very much in terms of Romania, which had a king being pressured by a right-wing political group, and also Albania. It’s a great anti-fascist statement, and sure evidence that Hergé was not one himself. The villains are the neighbouring Bordurians, a fascist state under the dictatorship of Müsstler. As I said, all the Tintin books mirror 20th century politics. And this one does the whole Nazi takeover of middle-European countries. It’s a wonderful book, and Tintin is of course quite heroic in thwarting this fascist takeover. The narrative is very strong, it’s beautifully drawn in a picturesque setting, and we have the first appearance of Bianca Castafiore. There are many great elements to it, and it would definitely be one of my desert island Tintin adventures. Yes. The quality of the Tintin books is a combination of quality of drawing – which is very high – and quality of narrative. Hergé was a huge film enthusiast from his early childhood on. During the occupation of Belgium in World War I, his mother would take him to small cinema theatres to see black-and-white silent films with a lot of slapstick – which was very important to the development of his strip cartoon. Early Hitchcock was also a great influence. And it was through Hitchcock that Hergé discovered John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps , a book that mirrors the way Hergé constructed a narrative."