Arthur de Gobineau

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Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), was a French diplomat, man of letters, and racial theorist. He was the first to propound the idea of Aryan superiority as a scientific theory.

Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was born on July 14, 1816, at Ville d'Avray near Paris, the scion of a noble family that remained loyal to the Bourbons. He attended school at the College of Bienne in Switzerland. From 1835 until his diplomatic sojourns he lived in Paris, where he occupied himself with literary work and a wide range of studies.

The Comte de Gobineau's aristocratic connections led to a meeting with Alexis de Tocqueville. When Tocqueville became foreign minister for a brief time in 1849, he made Gobineau his private secretary and, soon after, chief of his Cabinet. Later, Gobineau was made first secretary in the embassy at Berne, and later he held posts at Hanover and Frankfurt.

Gobineau's Theory

Gobineau's most important work, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-1855), partly translated into English in 1856, was an expression of his basic understanding of the meaning of his own life and of the events of his times. He was a royalist who despised democracy. He believed he was a descendant of a noble race of men, and he saw the French Revolution as a direct result of the bastardization of the race to which he belonged.

Gobineau sought to create a science of history by explaining the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of race. There were three races - the blacks, who were stupid and frivolous, but in whom the senses were well developed; the yellows, who craved mediocrity; and the whites, who were strong, intelligent, and handsome. Of the whites, the Aryans were superior, with the Germans being the purest of the Aryans. "German" did not refer to the entire German nation, die Deutschen, but rather to a tribe of Aryans, die Germanen, or Teutons, who had invaded Europe and set themselves up as an aristocracy to rule over the indigenous Celts and Slavs, who were inferior.

Gobineau did not believe that there are any modern pure races, nor was he set against all race mixing. He believed that civilization arose as the result of conquest by a superior race, virtually always Aryan, over inferior races. While Aryans were brave, strong, and intelligent, nevertheless they were a bit unimaginative and weak in sense perception. A small amount of infusion of black blood would heighten the senses and improve the imagination. Such an infusion, by way of Semites, explains the flowering of art and philosophy in ancient Greece.

However, Gobineau held that while some race mixing is good, too much is very bad, as it leads to the stagnation of civilization. Because Aryans have an appetite for race mixing, which made civilization possible in the first place, race mixing will eventually go too far, leading to the eventual destruction of civilization.

Gobineau was no nationalist. He associated nationalism with democracy and believed that both promoted excessive mixing of Aryan with inferior bloods. The disturbances of 1848 and 1871 increasingly convinced him that race mixing already had gone too far and European civilization was doomed. Today one can only wonder at this French count's fantastic version of the Germanic concept of the twilight of the gods!

Diplomatic and Literary Career

In 1854 Gobineau went to Teheran as first secretary, becoming minister to Persia in 1861. Several works on Persian society resulted, as well as a number of stories with a Persian setting.

In 1864 Gobineau represented France at Athens and in 1868 at Rio de Janeiro, where he became a friend of the Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II. Gobineau's last post was at Stockholm in 1872. He was forced to retire from the diplomatic corps in 1876 and spent most of his remaining years in Italy.

Gobineau continued his literary career. The Pleiads (1874) is considered his finest novel. Many of his literary writings were published posthumously. He met Richard Wagner in Rome in 1876 and subsequently made several trips to his home in Bayreuth. Gobineau's racial theories had not been well received in France, but Wagner was very much impressed by Gobineau's views. Partly through the influence of the Bayreuth circle, Gobineau's racial ideas became popular in Germany in the decades after his death in Turin on Oct. 13, 1882.

Further Reading

A recent work on Gobineau is Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology (1970). Two older works are Arnold H. Rowbotham, The Literary Works of Count de Gobineau (1929), and Gerald M. Spring, The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau (1932). See also Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937).

Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de (1816-82). French diplomat, poet, novelist, historian, and ethnographer. He was largely ignored during his lifetime, but his reputation has grown steadily in the 20th c. His long verse romances are deservedly forgotten, but a few of his historical novels continue to appeal: Ternove (1847), L'Abbaye de Typhaines (1849). Nowadays his fame rests on his later fiction. First are the striking short stories, rich in colour and incident and marked by irony, elegance, and psychological penetration. Best are: Mademoiselle Irnois (1847) and Adélaïde (1869), fine studies of female passion and frustration; and intriguing exotic tales collected in Nouvelles asiatiques (1876). Of considerable distinction is Les Pléiades (1874), a novel of friendship expressing Gobineau's cult of a natural élite. His gallery of Renaissance portraits, La Renaissance (1877), is vivid, as is the reportage of Trois ans en Asie (1859). His oriental scholarship is now suspect, as are the racial theories of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), a work exploited by the Nazis. In this, the decay of civilization is attributed not, as traditionally, to luxury, corruption of manners, irreligion, or systems of government, but to racial inequality and miscegenation. Tocqueville challenged his historical pessimism.

[S. Beynon John]

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Arthur de Gobineau in 1864

Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (Ville-d'Avray, July 14, 1816 – October 13, 1882 in Turin) 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.

Contents 1 Life and racialist theories 2 Writing 3 References 4 External links

Life and racialist theories

Portrait of de Gobineau by the Comtesse de la Tour, 1876

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 (Haiti),^[1] 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 Oriental studies. Gobineau believed that he was the descendant of Nordic Vikings and Condottieri.^[2]

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 in the creation of civilized culture and maintaining ordered government to the other races. However, he also thought that civilization development in other periods were different than in his own and speculated that other races might have superior qualities in those civilization periods than his own. Nonetheless, he believed European civilization represented the best of what remained of ancient civilizations and held the most superior attributes capable for continued survival. His primary thesis in regards to this theory was that European civilizational flowering from Greece to Rome and Germanic to contemporary were sprung and corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan" (Indo-Iranian race). Gobineau originally originally wrote that given the past trajectory of civilization in Europe white race miscegenation was inevitable and would result in growing chaos. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, with the spread of British and American civilization and the growth of Germany, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.

Paradoxically, although Gobineau saw hope in the expansion of European power, he did not support the creation of commercial empires with their attendent multicultural mileiu, concluding that the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. Instead, he saw the later period of the 19th century imperialism as a degenerative process in European civilization. To support his conclusion, he continually refered to past empires in Europe and their attendent movement of non-white peoples into European homelands in explaining the ethnography of the nations of Europe.

According to his theories, the mixed populations of Spain, most of France and Italy, most of Southern Germany, ost of Switzerland and Austria, and parts of the Britain, derived from the historical development of Roman, Greek, and Ottoman Empires which had opened up Europe to non-Aryan peoples of Africa and the Mediterraneum cultures. Also according to him, southern and western Iran, Southern Spain and Italy, consisted of 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. (Sabine, George (1988) Historia de la teoría política, Madrid: FCE)

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

Writing

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 wrote novels in addition to his works on race, 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. He 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.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} 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.
2. ^ Dagobert David Runes. Treasury of philosophy, Volume 1. Philosophical Library. p. 434. 

External links

• The Inequality of Human Races by Arthur de Gobineau, translated by Adrian Collins, M.A. at Google Books
• Les religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie centrale by Arthur de Gobineau at Google Books
• Trois ans en Asie (de 1855 à 1858) by Arthur de Gobineau at Google Books
• Histoire d'Ottar jarl, pirate norvégien, conquérant du pays de Bray, en Normandie, et de sa Desendence by Arthur de Gobineau at Google Books
• Lecture des textes cunéiformes by Arthur de Gobineau at Google Books

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