Arthur de Gobineau

Joseph Arthur, Count de Gobineau (Ville-d'Avray, 1816 - Turin, 1882), was a French diplomat and writer, best known for his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, a work often regarded as one of the earliest examples of scientific racism and one that shaped later racial doctrines. He belonged to the Legitimist tradition, which backed the rule of the Bourbon dynasty and opposed the French Revolution. Although his reputation rests on his racial theories, he also wrote novels, travel accounts and philological studies.

Born into a family of the nobility of the robe with roots in Bordeaux, he grew up in a household marked by poverty and the breakdown of his parents' marriage. As a teenager he became fascinated with the Middle Ages and, above all, with the Orient, although his formal education was patchy. After failing the entrance exams for the Saint-Cyr military academy, he settled in Paris in 1835 hoping to become a writer, and for years he got by writing serialized fiction and articles for conservative periodicals. Later, thanks to Alexis de Tocqueville, he joined the French foreign ministry, and from 1849 he built a diplomatic career that took him to Persia, Germany, Greece, Brazil and Sweden, lasting until 1877.

His theories began with a comparison between the East and Europe. He ranked peoples according to their eating habits and way of life, and drew conclusions about their abilities from those rankings. He held that the aristocracy kept more 'Aryan' traits because it had mixed less with other races, and that history was a sequence of migrations by this founding people, now threatened by intermixing. He saw racial mixing as the cause of Europe's decline and of the disorder that had led to the Revolution. His essay ended with a gloomy prediction of Russian domination and, afterwards, Chinese.

His influence was considerable and ambiguous. Defenders of slavery in the United States, such as Josiah C. Nott, put his ideas to use, and in Germany they inspired Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and leaders of the Nazi Party. Yet Gobineau was not markedly antisemitic, and in fact regarded Jews as a subdivision of the white race. Today his work is considered pseudoscience, and historians study it chiefly as a precursor of the racial doctrines of the twentieth century.