rodney:
On the statue, I think it's a reference to WWII.
I see a solider, with a rooster victorious over an Eagle?
For me this represents France (Rooster national symbol) over Germany (Eagle national symbol) for WWII.
I agree that it's certainly a French rooster (or Coq, as they'd say) vanquishing a German Eagle, but I'm pretty certain this is a WWI war memorial rather than a WWII one (making it a German Imperial eagle, rather than a Nazi one).
Almost all French towns and villages seem to have a memorial to its local men who died in WWI (or the Great War, as it was of course known before we had a Second World War to need to distinguish it from). So do most towns in Britain, of course.
There
are WWII memorial statues in Britain of course, but these tend to be more specific national monuments, such as the RAF one on the Embankment in London, rather than local ones. In Britain the names of the local men who died in WWII tend to be simply added to the list of the WWI dead on these WWI memorials, rather than there being a newer and separate WWII memorial in every town.
In France, having a grandiose statue showing the French Coq vanquishing the German eagle to symbolise what happened in World War
Two would be stretching historical reality too far even for the most nationalistic Frenchman!
It's true that - at the end of WWII - de Gaulle tended to insist that the work of his wartime Free French government in exile, and the undoubtably courageous work of the French Resistance, meant that France should be regarded as one of the victorious allies over Nazi Germany, rather than dwell on the shameful reality of France's quick capitulation to the Nazis at the start of the war.
But I don't think there was a great deal of jingostic statue building of this sort in France after WWII.
I think that WWII monuments in French towns and villages tend to be much more muted, tasteful memorials to those who died serving in the French Resistance.
rodney:
Just another example of Hergé displaying his feelings for WW2 and his satisfaction regarding the end result.
Following on from what I've written above, I think his could actually be read as Hergé satirising over-the-top French patriotism/jingoism at the end of WWI.
At the end of WWI, the victorious French government was at the forefront of punishing a defeated Germany really hard, economically - a policy which in retrospect is usually regarded as a mistake, since leaving Germany to sink into desparate poverty arguably led to the rise of Hitler. I'm guessing, but maybe this statue, with the French Coq squashing the German Eagle so forcefully, is a pastiche of actual WWI memorials that Hergé had seen in French towns.
The Calculus Affair is interesting in that it contains this direct reference to WWI, and also a direct reference to WWII, in the real book on Nazi research that Professor Topolino shows them.
That's appropriate in a book about how the Cold War could so easily have led to a WWIII, of course.
But it's often struck me as interesting and unusual that Hergé chose to include this real-life book so directly.
As a child reader, even without knowing that it's a real book, or much about the historical reality behind it, I noticed the similarity of the rocket on the front of this book and Calculus's rocket in the
Moon books.
It's almost as if in this section of
The Calculus Affair, Hergé was flagging up to readers that Calculus's rocket in the previous adventure is basically based on a Nazi V2 missile, just in case anyone had missed the similarity!
I'm not suggesting that Hergé was making pro-German or pro-Nazi points with either the war memorial or with his V2-inspired Moon rocket.
But I think he may have been mocking the simplistic patriotism of the victor with the War Memorial, having been on the receiving end of it himself at the end of WWII.
And he may have been deliberately pointing out that the real space programmes of the US and Russia owed almost everything to the German rocket scientists of the Third Reich.
The Tintin books as a whole suggest that Hergé was extremely anti-war, but he tends not to demonise soldiers, even ones fighting for the "baddies".
Even when they're trying to kill Tintin, his soldiers tend to look like ordinary poor sods, just obeying orders.
I guess Skut is the ultimate example of this, but it tends to be true of all his nameless soldiers manning firing squads, faulty field-guns, etc.
In his series of historical aircraft pictures, drawn with his Studios staff for
Tintin magazine in the 1950s (I think), Hergé didn't shy away from portraying Tintin in various Nazi uniforms next to the German planes of that era.
You don't get the feeling he's celebrating the Nazi uniforms, just that he's showing what a youth like Tintin would have had to wear if he'd happened to be a young German at that time, and you sense that he's refusing to apologise for that.
And the German airmen in these pictures don't look any worse as human beings than the allied airmen.
I seem to have gone off on a ramble! It shows how much there is to spot and discuss in these detailed big pictures!
