On 14 July 1816, the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a son was born to Anne-Louise Madeleine de Gercy, the wife of Count Louis de Gobineau, an officer of the Royal Guard who had followed Louis XVIII into exile during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return the previous year. When young Arthur was 11, his mother decamped with her three children and a lover to Germany and then to Switzerland, which gave the boy the advantage of 18 months at the Collège de Bienne. His prospects were compromised by the family’s Legitimist sympathies and the lack of mathematical knowledge which barred him from a military career, but his Germanic education was to lay the foundations for a life’s work based on orientalism and organicism.

Portrait of Gobineau from his The Golden Flower (New York and London, 1924) 10633.d.36.

In October 1835, having failed the entrance examination for Saint-Cyr, Gobineau landed with 50 francs in his pocket on the Paris doorstep of his wealthy and eccentric uncle Thibault-Joseph, who was obsessed with the restoration of the legitimate kings of France. After three weeks of complete neglect, his nephew threatened to commit suicide on the spot, at which the elderly adventurer deigned to pay him some attention. However, he provided little practical help, and Gobineau had to rely on letters of introduction to Sainte-Beuve and other literati while he rented a garret and attempted to launch his literary career. By 1846 he had succeeded enough to marry, but it was not until 1849 that he secured a post as first secretary of the French Legation in Berne through the good offices of his mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, now minister of foreign affairs.

Although Gobineau’s 30-year diplomatic career took him all over the world, with postings to Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Newfoundland, Sweden and Brazil, he was temperamentally unsuited to the profession. It did, however, allow him to travel twice to Persia, where he camped among Bedouins and enjoyed the splendours of life as the head of the French Legation in Teheran in 1855-58. A second appointment as plenipotentiary (1862-63) enabled him to develop his knowledge of Persian and Arabic, peruse rare manuscripts, and compose his Traité des écritures cuneiforms (Paris, 1864; 7702.f.13) as well as Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865; 2217.d.3). Aghast at the prospect of being posted to the United States, which he abhorred because of its cruel treatment of Native Americans and black people, and its uniform mass culture based on the uncritical worship of technology and democracy, he was relieved to be appointed to Athens instead in 1865. After bitter disillusionment at the conduct of Germany in 1870-71, he was delighted to become plenipotentiary in Stockholm in 1872, feeling a profound affinity with the lands from which he believed his Norman forebears had originated.

Title-page of Histoire d’Ottar Jarl, pirate norvégien (Paris, 1879; 10761.e.27), in which Gobineau describes a (fanciful) Viking-Norman descent for his family.

Not surprisingly, his nomadic existence took its toll on family life, and by 1876 resulted in a complete break with his wife and two daughters. His declining years, in which his health suffered as a result of recurrent fevers contracted in Brazil, were mitigated by his relationship with Mathilde de La Tour, an Italian diplomat’s wife, and literary and intellectual friendships such as that with Richard Wagner, whom he first met in Rome in 1876 and who invited him to stay at Bayreuth.

Had Gobineau confined himself to writing fiction, travel memoirs and works of scholarship, he would probably be remembered nowadays as little more than a minor literary figure. However, a book which he published in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’), secured him a far more notorious reputation.

 Title-page of the first volume of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris, 1853). 10006.dd.14 (and available online)

Although the Essai caused Gobineau’s contemporaries to prevent his election to the Académie française, this was not on the grounds of racism but of scientifically unconvincing theories and anti-Christian determinism. Ironically, in view of the author’s detestation of the United States, it was first published in English in Philadelphia in 1856 (10006.d.30). A German translation (12901.cc.9) appeared in the same year, and Wagner  was sufficiently interested in Gobineau’s ideas to collaborate with him on an article which appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter (P.P.1943.b.) for May-June 1881.

Gobineau’s division of the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that ‘history springs only from contact with the white races’ and distinguishing the ‘Aryan’ race as the pinnacle of human development and the basis of all European aristocracies, certainly exerted a sinister influence on the pernicious racial ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet a close reading suggests that the Nazi thinkers who espoused his theories had not  read them in depth: Gobineau had a high regard for the cultural and intellectual achievements of Judaism, and nothing but condemnation for discrimination and inhumanity proceeding from racism. Indeed, Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a far more direct precursor of National Socialist theories, was dismissive of Gobineau as a paranoid unrealistic dreamer, whose writings were irrelevant to Chamberlain’s own vision of the future. Moreover, the unwieldy treatise was little read in Germany until the 1890s, when Gobineau, who had died in Turin in 1882, was unable to defend his ‘divination’ of the distant future against those who seized upon and distorted his ideas. He emphasized the dangers of expansionism which could only lead to its own destruction, and in this, at least, he was a true prophet of the disasters to come.

It is a final irony that a man with a lifelong distrust of bourgeois monarchy, indiscriminate democracy and the forces of revolution should have been born on the day still celebrated as that on which the French Revolution and the cause of national democracy in France burst upon the world.

Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement