Arthur de Gobineau

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. Inspiring a social movement in Germany named Gobinism, his works were also influential on prominent antisemites like Richard Wagner, Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Romanian politician Professor A. C. Cuza, and leaders of the Nazi Party, who later edited and re-published his work.