Arthur de Gobineau

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Arthur de Gobineau.
Arthur de Gobineau.

Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (July 14, 1816 — October 13, 1882) was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the racialist theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855). De Gobineau is credited as being the father of modern racial demography.

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[edit] Life and racialist theories

Gobineau had a strained family life: his father was a government official and staunch royalist, his mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a royal tax official and a Creole woman from Santo Domingo[citation needed], and a lady-in-waiting to Pauline Bonaparte, who subsequently published both a sentimental novel, Marguerite d'Alby (1821), and her own memoirs, Une Vie de Femme, Liée aux Événements de l'Époque (A Woman's Life, Tied to the Events of the Time, 1835). When he was fourteen his mother eloped with another man and brought Josef with her to Switzerland for a few years. It was in Switzerland that he began his interest in Orientalism.

When Gobineau returned to France in the later years of the July monarchy, he made his living writing serialized fiction (romans-feuilletons) and contributing to reactionary periodicals. He struck up a friendship, and had voluminous correspondence with, Alexis de Tocqueville, who brought him into the foreign ministry while he was foreign minister during the Second Republic.[1] Gobineau was a successful diplomat for the French Second Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and southern France as racially mixed.

Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan"(Indo-Iranian race). Gobineau originally wrote that white race miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.

To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process. According to his definitions, the people of Spain, most of France, most of Germany, southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy and a large part of Britain, consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole of north India consisted of a yellow race.


Hitler and Nazism borrowed much of Gobineau's ideology, though Gobineau himself was not particularly anti-Semitic. When the Nazis adopted Gobineau's theories, they were forced to edit his work extensively to make it conform to their views, much as they did in the case of Nietzsche.

Gobineau visited Bayreuth, home of Richard Wagner shortly before his death. There he influenced the development of the anti-Semitic "Bayreuth circle".


[edit] Miscellaneous

To Bahá'ís, Gobineau is known as the person who obtained the only complete manuscript of the early history of the Bábí religious movement of Persia, written by Hâjji Mirza Jân of Kashan, who was put to death by the Persian authorities in c.1852. The manuscript now is in the Bibliothèque nationale at Paris.

Gobineau also wrote novels, notably Les Pléiades (1874). His study La Renaissance (1877) also was admired in his day. Both of these works strongly expressed his reactionary aristocratic politics, and his hatred of democratic mass culture.

Gobineau believed himself to be the descendant of Nordic Vikings and Condottieri.

Gobineau was also a great philhellene. He wrote an important account of the original Greek State, the To the Kingdom of the Greeks in the end of the 19th century.

[edit] References

  1. ^ DJ. Richards, "Arthur de Gobineau" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 123: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860-1900. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Tulane University. The Gale Group, 1992. pp. 101-117.

[edit] External links