Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific racist theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race. Known to his contemporaries as a novelist, diplomat and travel writer, he was an elitist who, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In it he claimed aristocrats were superior to commoners, and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races. Theory on French aristocrats Reflecting his disdain for ordinary people, Gobineau claimed French aristocrats like himself were the descendants of the Germanic Franks who conquered the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century AD, while common French people were the descendants of racially inferior Celtic and Mediterranean people. This was an old theory first promoted in a tract by Count Henri de Boulainvilliers. He had argued that the Second Estate (the aristocracy) was of "Frankish" blood and the Third Estate (the commoners) were of "Gaulish" blood. Born after the French Revolution had destroyed the idealized Ancien Régime of his imagination, Gobineau felt a deep sense of pessimism regarding the future. Like many other European romantic conservatives, Gobineau looked back nostalgically at an idealized version of the Middle Ages as an idyllic agrarian society living harmoniously in a rigid social order. He loathed modern Paris, a city he called a "giant cesspool" full of les déracinés ("the uprooted")—the criminal, impoverished, drifting men with no real home. Gobineau considered them to be the monstrous products of centuries of miscegenation ready to explode in revolutionary violence at any moment. He was an ardent opponent of democracy, which he claimed was mere "mobocracy"—a system that allowed the utterly stupid mob the final say on running the state. Gobineau came to believe race created culture. He argued that distinctions among the three races—"black", "white", and "yellow"—were natural barriers; "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. Of the three races, he argued blacks were physically very strong but incapable of intelligent thought. Regarding the "yellows" (Asians) he claimed they were physically and intellectually mediocre but had an extremely strong materialism that allowed them to achieve certain results. Finally, Gobineau wrote whites were the best and greatest of the three races as they alone were capable of intelligent thought, creating beauty and were the most beautiful. "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" he claimed , and any positive qualities the Asians and blacks possessed was due to subsequent miscegenation. In his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, Gobineau ultimately accepts the prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve (monogenism as opposed to polygenism). He suggests, however, that "nothing proves that at the first redaction of the Adamite genealogies the colored races were considered as forming part of the species"; and, "We may conclude that the power of producing fertile offspring is among the marks of a distinct species. As nothing leads us to believe that the human race is outside this rule, there is no answer to this argument." He originally wrote that, given the past trajectory of civilization in Europe, white race miscegenation was inevitable and would result in growing chaos. Despite his claims whites were the most beautiful of the races, he believed Asian and black women had immense powers of sexual attraction over white men. Whenever whites were in close proximity to blacks and Asians, the result was always miscegenation as white men were seduced by the beauty of Asian and black women, to the detriment of whites. Though not expressly obsessed with antisemitism, Gobineau saw the Jews as praiseworthy for their ability to avoid miscegenation while at the same time depicting them as another alien force for the decay of Aryan Europe. Focus on Aryans as a superior race Gobineau claimed the Aryans had founded the ten great civilizations of the world, writing: "In the ten civilizations no Negro race is seen an initiator. Only when it is mixed with some other, can it even be initiated into a civilization. Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes". Gobineau, mindful of his own supposed noble and Frankish descent classified the Germanic peoples as being the Aryans in Europe. Summarizing Mosse's argument, Davies argued that: "The self-serving, materialistic oriental of the Essai was really an anti-capitalist's portrait of the money-grubbing French middle class" while "the sensual, unintelligent and violent negro" that Gobineau portrayed in the Essai was an aristocratic caricature of the French poor. In his writings on the French peasantry, Gobineau characteristically insisted in numerous anecdotes, he claimed were based on personal experience, that French farmers were coarse, crude people incapable of learning, indeed of any sort of thinking beyond the most rudimentary level of thought. As the American critic Michelle Wright wrote, "the peasant may inhabit the land, but they are certainly not part of it". Wright further noted the very marked similarity between Gobineau's picture of the French peasantry and his view of blacks. Time in Persia In 1855, Gobineau left Paris to become the first secretary at the French legation in Tehran, Persia (modern Iran). He was promoted to chargé d'affaires the following year. The histories of Persia and Greece had played prominent roles in the Essai and Gobineau wanted to see both places for himself. His mission was to keep Persia out of the Russian sphere of influence, but he cynically wrote: "If the Persians ... unite with the western powers, they will march against the Russians in the morning, be defeated by them at noon and become their allies by evening". Gobineau's time was not taxed by his diplomatic duties, and he spent time studying ancient cuneiform texts and learning Persian. He came to speak a "kitchen Persian" that allowed him to talk to Persians somewhat. (He was never fluent in Persian as he claimed to be .) Despite having some love for the Persians, Gobineau was shocked they lacked his racial prejudices and were willing to accept blacks as equals. He criticized Persian society for being too "democratic". In 1856, two American "race scientists", Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, both ardent white supremacists, translated Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines into English. Champions of slavery, they found in Gobineau's anti-black writings a convenient justification for the "peculiar institution". Nott and Hotz found much to approve of in the Essai such as: "The Negro is the most humble and lags at the bottom of the scale. The animal character imprinted upon his brow marks his destiny from the moment of his conception". Much to Gobineau's intense annoyance, Nott and Hotze abridged the first volume of the Essai from 1,600 pages in the French original down to 400 in English. At least part of the reason for this was because of Gobineau's hostile picture of Americans. About American white people, Gobineau declared: They are a very mixed assortment of the most degenerate races in olden-day Europe. They are the human flotsam of all ages: Irish, crossbreed Germans and French and Italians of even more doubtful stock. The intermixture of all these decadent ethnic varieties will inevitably give birth to further ethnic chaos. This chaos is no way unexpected or new: it will produce no further ethnic mixture which has not already been, or cannot be realized on our own continent. Absolutely nothing productive will result from it, and even when ethnic combinations resulting from infinite unions between Germans, Irish, Italians, French and Anglo-Saxons join us in the south with racial elements composed of Indian, Negro, Spanish and Portuguese essence, it is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusions, but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people. Highly critical passages like this were removed from The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, as the Essai was titled in English. Nott and Hotzel retained only the parts relating to the alleged inherent inferiority of blacks. Likewise, they used Gobineau as a way of attempting to establish that white America was in mortal peril despite the fact that most American blacks were slaves in 1856. The two "race scientists" argued on the basis of the Essai that blacks were essentially a type of vicious animal, rather than human beings, and would always pose a danger to whites. The passages of the Essai where Gobineau declared that, though of low intelligence, blacks had certain artistic talents and that a few "exceptional" African tribal chiefs probably had a higher IQ than those of the stupidest whites were not included in the American edition. Nott and Hotze wanted nothing that might give blacks admirable human qualities. Beyond that, they claimed that nation and race were the same, and that to be American was to be white. As such, the American translators argued in their introduction that just as various European nations were torn apart by nationality conflicts caused by different "races" living together, likewise ending slavery and granting American citizenship to blacks would cause the same sort of conflicts, but only on a much vaster scale in the United States. According to his theories, the mixed populations of Spain, most of France and Italy, most of Southern Germany, most of Switzerland and Austria, and parts of Britain derived from the historical development of the Roman, Greek, and Ottoman empires, which had brought the non-Aryan peoples of Africa and the Mediterranean cultures to western and northern Europe. He believed the populations of southern and western Iran, southern Spain and Italy consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation, and the whole of north India consisted of a "yellow" (Asian) race. Gobineau was extremely hostile towards Slavic peoples, especially Russians who, he claimed , had become a semi-Asian people as a result of miscegenation under the Golden Horde. He described the Slavs as "a stagnant marsh in which all superior ethnic strains after a few hours of triumph found themselves engulfed". Romania Gobineau's theories were a major influence on the Romanian radical anti-Semitic politician Professor A. C. Cuza, who embraced his biological racism as a way of "proving" the Jews were a "plague" upon modern Romanian life. Like most of Gobineau's followers, Cuza rejected his pessimism as too extreme, but he argued that Romanian people formed out of a fusion between the ancient Dacians and Romans had best preserved the Aryan blood, and that the Jews as a biologically different people simply did not belong in Romania. Cuza, who was deeply impressed with Gobineau, often used his theories and rhetoric of racial degeneration to frame his anti-Semitic arguments about the "Jewish race". Cuza frequently claimed the Jews were a "plague" upon Romania. He asserted the Romanian people were in the midst of the sort of racial degeneration described by Gobineau, which for Cuza was caused by the Jews. At various times Cuza had been a mentor to various figures on the Romanian radical right such as Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the poet-politician Octavian Goga and Marshal Ion Antonescu; his influence was considerable in 1930s–40s Romania. In 1894, the Wagnerite and anti-Semitic journalist Ludwig Schemann founded the Gobineau Vereinigung (Gobineau Society) to promote Gobineau's theories in Germany, spawning the Gobinism movement. Schemann was close to Cosima Wagner and was inspired by her to found the Gobineau Vereinigung. It was a small group, but it exercised much intellectual influence, and in this way popularized the theory of an Aryan master-race in Germany. The Gobineauismus that Schemann and the Gobineau Vereinigung promoted owed as much to Wagner as it did to Gobineau for the group rejected Gobineau's pessimism and claimed the Aryan race could be saved. Schemann, who was one of the most influential and best known race theorists in Imperial Germany, projected an optimistic message about the future of the Aryan race while accepting Gobineau's basic idea about an Aryan master race. Schemann was the man who popularized Gobineau in Germany and it was largely through him, rather than reading the Essai directly, that Gobineauismus was promoted in the Reich. In 1937, Schemann was personally awarded the Goethe Medal by Hitler for his "services to the nation and race". Until the Second World War, Gobineau's writings were cited in Brazil in support of the claim that miscegenation caused "physical degeneration" and there must be no interracial sex in Brazil if the Brazilian people were to have a positive future. By contrast, in reaction to intellectuals like Vianna who cited Gobineau, the Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre wrote a series of books in the 1920s–30s praising miscegenation and the black Brazilian culture, arguing that the fusion of white, black and Indians had given Brazil a distinctive culture and the Brazilian people a distinctive appearance, creating the theory of Lusotropicalism. Freyre argued that Gobineau was a snobbish Frenchman who looked down upon Brazilians as not measuring up to Europe. This led Freyre to reject the idea that Europe should be the standard for Brazil, arguing the Brazilians had created a new civilization based on an interaction of the descendants of Indians, African slaves and European immigrants that was superior to the Europeans with their obsession with racial purity. Freyre dismissed the writings of Gobineau and Chamberlain as "diffuse, loquacious and wrong".
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific racist theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race. Known to his contemporaries as a novelist, diplomat and travel writer, he was an elitist who, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In it he argued aristocrats were superior to commoners, and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races. Theory on French aristocrats Reflecting his disdain for ordinary people, Gobineau said French aristocrats like himself were the descendants of the Germanic Franks who conquered the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century AD, while common French people were the descendants of racially inferior Celtic and Mediterranean people. This was an old theory first promoted in a tract by Count Henri de Boulainvilliers. He had argued that the Second Estate (the aristocracy) was of "Frankish" blood and the Third Estate (the commoners) were of "Gaulish" blood. Born after the French Revolution had destroyed the idealized Ancien Régime of his imagination, Gobineau felt a deep sense of pessimism regarding the future. Like many other European romantic conservatives, Gobineau looked back nostalgically at an idealized version of the Middle Ages as an idyllic agrarian society living harmoniously in a rigid social order. He loathed modern Paris, a city he called a "giant cesspool" full of les déracinés ("the uprooted")—the criminal, impoverished, drifting men with no real home. Gobineau considered them to be the monstrous products of centuries of miscegenation ready to explode in revolutionary violence at any moment. He was an ardent opponent of democracy, which he stated was mere "mobocracy"—a system that allowed the utterly stupid mob the final say on running the state. Gobineau came to believe race created culture. He argued that distinctions among the three races—"black", "white", and "yellow"—were natural barriers; "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. Of the three races, he argued blacks were physically very strong but incapable of intelligent thought. Regarding the "yellows" (Asians) he said they were physically and intellectually mediocre but had an extremely strong materialism that allowed them to achieve certain results. Finally, Gobineau wrote whites were the best and greatest of the three races as they alone were capable of intelligent thought, creating beauty and were the most beautiful. "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" he wrote , and any positive qualities the Asians and blacks possessed was due to subsequent miscegenation. In his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, Gobineau ultimately accepts the prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve (monogenism as opposed to polygenism). He suggests, however, that "nothing proves that at the first redaction of the Adamite genealogies the colored races were considered as forming part of the species"; and, "We may conclude that the power of producing fertile offspring is among the marks of a distinct species. As nothing leads us to believe that the human race is outside this rule, there is no answer to this argument." He originally wrote that, given the past trajectory of civilization in Europe, white race miscegenation was inevitable and would result in growing chaos. Despite his opinion that whites were the most beautiful of the races, he believed Asian and black women had immense powers of sexual attraction over white men. Whenever whites were in close proximity to blacks and Asians, the result was always miscegenation as white men were seduced by the beauty of Asian and black women, to the detriment of whites. Though not expressly obsessed with antisemitism, Gobineau saw the Jews as praiseworthy for their ability to avoid miscegenation while at the same time depicting them as another alien force for the decay of Aryan Europe. Focus on Aryans as a superior race Gobineau asserted that the Aryans had founded the ten great civilizations of the world, writing: "In the ten civilizations no Negro race is seen an initiator. Only when it is mixed with some other, can it even be initiated into a civilization. Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes". Gobineau, mindful of his own supposed noble and Frankish descent classified the Germanic peoples as being the Aryans in Europe. Summarizing Mosse's argument, Davies argued that: "The self-serving, materialistic oriental of the Essai was really an anti-capitalist's portrait of the money-grubbing French middle class" while "the sensual, unintelligent and violent negro" that Gobineau portrayed in the Essai was an aristocratic caricature of the French poor. In his writings on the French peasantry, Gobineau characteristically insisted in numerous anecdotes, which he said were based on personal experience, that French farmers were coarse, crude people incapable of learning, indeed of any sort of thinking beyond the most rudimentary level of thought. As the American critic Michelle Wright wrote, "the peasant may inhabit the land, but they are certainly not part of it". Wright further noted the very marked similarity between Gobineau's picture of the French peasantry and his view of blacks. Time in Persia In 1855, Gobineau left Paris to become the first secretary at the French legation in Tehran, Persia (modern Iran). He was promoted to chargé d'affaires the following year. The histories of Persia and Greece had played prominent roles in the Essai and Gobineau wanted to see both places for himself. His mission was to keep Persia out of the Russian sphere of influence, but he cynically wrote: "If the Persians ... unite with the western powers, they will march against the Russians in the morning, be defeated by them at noon and become their allies by evening". Gobineau's time was not taxed by his diplomatic duties, and he spent time studying ancient cuneiform texts and learning Persian. He came to speak a "kitchen Persian" that allowed him to talk to Persians somewhat. (He was never fluent in Persian as he said he was .) Despite having some love for the Persians, Gobineau was shocked they lacked his racial prejudices and were willing to accept blacks as equals. He criticized Persian society for being too "democratic". In 1856, two American "race scientists", Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, both ardent white supremacists, translated Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines into English. Champions of slavery, they found in Gobineau's anti-black writings a convenient justification for the "peculiar institution". Nott and Hotz found much to approve of in the Essai such as: "The Negro is the most humble and lags at the bottom of the scale. The animal character imprinted upon his brow marks his destiny from the moment of his conception". Much to Gobineau's intense annoyance, Nott and Hotze abridged the first volume of the Essai from 1,600 pages in the French original down to 400 in English. At least part of the reason for this was because of Gobineau's hostile picture of Americans. About American white people, Gobineau declared: They are a very mixed assortment of the most degenerate races in olden-day Europe. They are the human flotsam of all ages: Irish, crossbreed Germans and French and Italians of even more doubtful stock. The intermixture of all these decadent ethnic varieties will inevitably give birth to further ethnic chaos. This chaos is no way unexpected or new: it will produce no further ethnic mixture which has not already been, or cannot be realized on our own continent. Absolutely nothing productive will result from it, and even when ethnic combinations resulting from infinite unions between Germans, Irish, Italians, French and Anglo-Saxons join us in the south with racial elements composed of Indian, Negro, Spanish and Portuguese essence, it is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusions, but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people. Highly critical passages like this were removed from The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, as the Essai was titled in English. Nott and Hotzel retained only the parts relating to the alleged inherent inferiority of blacks. Likewise, they used Gobineau as a way of attempting to establish that white America was in mortal peril despite the fact that most American blacks were slaves in 1856. The two "race scientists" argued on the basis of the Essai that blacks were essentially a type of vicious animal, rather than human beings, and would always pose a danger to whites. The passages of the Essai where Gobineau declared that, though of low intelligence, blacks had certain artistic talents and that a few "exceptional" African tribal chiefs probably had a higher IQ than those of the stupidest whites were not included in the American edition. Nott and Hotze wanted nothing that might give blacks admirable human qualities. Beyond that, they argued that nation and race were the same, and that to be American was to be white. As such, the American translators argued in their introduction that just as various European nations were torn apart by nationality conflicts caused by different "races" living together, likewise ending slavery and granting American citizenship to blacks would cause the same sort of conflicts, but only on a much vaster scale in the United States. According to his theories, the mixed populations of Spain, most of France and Italy, most of Southern Germany, most of Switzerland and Austria, and parts of Britain derived from the historical development of the Roman, Greek, and Ottoman empires, which had brought the non-Aryan peoples of Africa and the Mediterranean cultures to western and northern Europe. He believed the populations of southern and western Iran, southern Spain and Italy consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation, and the whole of north India consisted of a "yellow" (Asian) race. Gobineau was extremely hostile towards Slavic peoples, especially Russians who, he thought , had become a semi-Asian people as a result of miscegenation under the Golden Horde. He described the Slavs as "a stagnant marsh in which all superior ethnic strains after a few hours of triumph found themselves engulfed". Romania Gobineau's theories were a major influence on the Romanian radical anti-Semitic politician Professor A. C. Cuza, who embraced his biological racism as a way of "proving" the Jews were a "plague" upon modern Romanian life. Like most of Gobineau's followers, Cuza rejected his pessimism as too extreme, but he argued that Romanian people formed out of a fusion between the ancient Dacians and Romans had best preserved the Aryan blood, and that the Jews as a biologically different people simply did not belong in Romania. Cuza, who was deeply impressed with Gobineau, often used his theories and rhetoric of racial degeneration to frame his anti-Semitic arguments about the "Jewish race". Cuza frequently described the Jews were a "plague" upon Romania. He asserted the Romanian people were in the midst of the sort of racial degeneration described by Gobineau, which for Cuza was caused by the Jews. At various times Cuza had been a mentor to various figures on the Romanian radical right such as Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the poet-politician Octavian Goga and Marshal Ion Antonescu; his influence was considerable in 1930s–40s Romania. In 1894, the Wagnerite and anti-Semitic journalist Ludwig Schemann founded the Gobineau Vereinigung (Gobineau Society) to promote Gobineau's theories in Germany, spawning the Gobinism movement. Schemann was close to Cosima Wagner and was inspired by her to found the Gobineau Vereinigung. It was a small group, but it exercised much intellectual influence, and in this way popularized the theory of an Aryan master-race in Germany. The Gobineauismus that Schemann and the Gobineau Vereinigung promoted owed as much to Wagner as it did to Gobineau for the group rejected Gobineau's pessimism and believed the Aryan race could be saved. Schemann, who was one of the most influential and best known race theorists in Imperial Germany, projected an optimistic message about the future of the Aryan race while accepting Gobineau's basic idea about an Aryan master race. Schemann was the man who popularized Gobineau in Germany and it was largely through him, rather than reading the Essai directly, that Gobineauismus was promoted in the Reich. In 1937, Schemann was personally awarded the Goethe Medal by Hitler for his "services to the nation and race". Until the Second World War, Gobineau's writings were cited in Brazil in support of the idea that miscegenation caused "physical degeneration" and there must be no interracial sex in Brazil if the Brazilian people were to have a positive future. By contrast, in reaction to intellectuals like Vianna who cited Gobineau, the Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre wrote a series of books in the 1920s–30s praising miscegenation and the black Brazilian culture, arguing that the fusion of white, black and Indians had given Brazil a distinctive culture and the Brazilian people a distinctive appearance, creating the theory of Lusotropicalism. Freyre argued that Gobineau was a snobbish Frenchman who looked down upon Brazilians as not measuring up to Europe. This led Freyre to reject the idea that Europe should be the standard for Brazil, arguing the Brazilians had created a new civilization based on an interaction of the descendants of Indians, African slaves and European immigrants that was superior to the Europeans with their obsession with racial purity. Freyre dismissed the writings of Gobineau and Chamberlain as "diffuse, loquacious and wrong".
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