阿瑟·德·戈平瑙

Arthur de Gobineau, Count de Gobineau (French: [ɡɔbino]; Joseph Arthur de Gobineau; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French writer and diplomat who is best known for helping introduce scientific race theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race and Nordicism. 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 that aristocrats were superior to commoners and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races.

Gobineau was born to an aristocratic family of counts under the Ancien Régime. He was ideologically a Legitimist who supported royalist rule by the House of Bourbon and opposed the French Revolution, democracy, and rule by the House of Orléans which came to power after the 1830 July Revolution. He began his diplomatic career in the late 1840s, and beginning in 1861, variously served as minister to Persia, Brazil, Greece, and Sweden. As a writer, Gobineau authored novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction travel writings, polemical essays and other philological and anthropological works, including his Essai. His Essai is widely discredited as pseudoscience by modern scholarship. Gobineau himself never had any qualifications in anthropology.

Although Gobineau's writings were poorly received in France, they were quickly praised by white supremacist, pro-slavery Americans like Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, who translated his book into English. They omitted around 1,000 pages of the original book, including those parts that negatively described Americans as a racially mixed population.……

Early life and writings

Origins

Gobineau came from an old well-established aristocratic family. His father, Louis de Gobineau (1784–1858), was a military officer and staunch royalist. His mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a non-noble royal tax official. The de Gercy family lived in the French Crown colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) for a time in the 18th century.

Adolescence

Gobineau spent the early part of his teenage years in the town of Inzligen where his mother and her lover were staying.……

Early diplomatic work and theories on race

Embittered royalist

Gobineau's novels and poems of the 1830s–40s were usually set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance with aristocratic heroes who by their very existence uphold all of the values Gobineau felt were worth celebrating like honor and creativity against a corrupt, soulless middle class.……

Racial theories and aristocrats

Shocked by the Revolution of 1848, Gobineau first expressed his racial theories in his 1848 epic poem Manfredine.……

An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races

In his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, Gobineau seemingly accepts the prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve (monogenism as opposed to polygenism).……

Ministerial career

Minister to Persia

In 1861, Gobineau returned to Tehran as the French minister and lived a modest, ascetic lifestyle. He became obsessed with ancient Persia. This soon got out of control as he sought to prove ancient Persia was founded by his much admired Aryans, leading him to engage in what Irwin called "deranged" theories about Persia's history.……

Criticism of Gobineau's Persian work

Only with his studies in ancient Persia did Gobineau come under fire from scholars.……

Legacy and influence

Gobineau's ideas were influential in a number of countries, especially Romania, Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Brazil, both during his lifetime and after his death.……

Works in English translation

Non-fiction

The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856 (rep. by Garland Pub., 1984).

The Inequality of Human Races, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915.

The Inequality of Human Races, William Heinemann, 1915 [Thurland & Thurland, 1915; Howard Fertig Pub., 1967; Rep., 1999].

Method of Reading Cuneiform Texts, Educational Society's Press, 1865.