Social thinking of Arthur de Gobineau

The French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau developed a set of ideas that were influential during his life and some of them that impacted later social thinkers, such politicians, anthropologists, and sociologists.

[1] An ethnically pro-Germanic, anti-national and particularly anti-French ideology,[2] the movement influenced German nationalists and intellectuals such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche[3] and the precursor of Zionism, Moses Hess.

[5] The poem, set at the time of the revolt in Naples against Spanish rule in 1647 (an allegory for 1848), concerns the eponymous character, a noblewoman on whom Gobineau spends a good five hundred lines tracing her descent from Viking ancestors.

Neptune et son trident, Servent l'Anglo-Saxon, leur dernier descendant, Et les déserts peuplés de la jeune Amérique, Connaissenet le pouvior de ce peuple héroïque, Mais Romains, Allemands, Gaulois, [...] Pour en finir, Ce qui n'est pas Germain est créé pour servir.And the Germanic People, displaying the blond hair of their ancestors, emerged to rule in every corner of the world.

[citation needed] The ancient Hindu scriptures with their tales of Aryan heroes were of major interest to scholars attempting to trace the origins of the Indo-European peoples.

[12] 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.

[21] Gobineau described the Aryans as physically extremely beautiful and very tall; of immense intelligence and strength, and endowed with incredible energy, great creativity in the arts and a love of war.

[26] Gobineau's 1874 novel Les Pléiades is concerned with a few exceptionally talented people who are examples of "ethnic persistence" in Europe surrounded by vast masses of morons.

An example is an Uzbek noblewoman, adopted by a Russian officer, retaining the ferocity of her race by attempting to blind his biological daughter while an Afghan prince rises far above the rest because of his Aryan blood.

[28] In his 1877 novel La Renaissance, Gobineau again highlights the theme of a few gifted "Aryan" heroes such as Cesare Borgia and Pope Julius II having the misfortune to be surrounded by an endless multitude of debased inferiors.

[29] As such, Pope Alexander VI is presented as a hero in La Renaissance, precisely because of the utterly ruthless way in which he advanced the interests of the Borgia family in defiance of morality.

[35] Wagner was greatly impressed with the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines and he used his newspaper Bayreuther Blätter to popularize Gobineau's racial theories in Germany.

[36] Field wrote that "Gobineau's chief work, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines contained a far more detailed and closely argued explanation for cultural decadence than anything Wagner had written.

[39] Despite having failed the entrance exams to St. Cyr, Gobineau had an intensely militaristic view of the world, believing different races were born to hate each other and humans have an innate desire to kill one another.

[41] Despite being a diplomat whose nominal job was to achieve French policy goals without resorting to war, and despite his personal distaste for the House of Bonaparte, Gobineau very much welcomed the militarism of Napoleon III as bringing greatness back to France.

In a letter to his sister Caroline in October 1854, Gobineau wrote: "After twenty years of a peace that has promoted only corruption and revolution, we find ourselves in a military atmosphere which, from its very beginning, has encouraged many fine things.

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.

[24] Gobineau argued Chinese civilization had been created by a group of Aryan conquerors from India who had brought the indigenous Malay people living there under their heel.

[51] He saw the growth of Russian power as opening the door for a Chinese invasion of Europe, writing to Pedro II in 1879:What the Russians will have done within ten years will be to have opened towards the West the flood-gates to the vast human horde that we find so ill at ease in China; and it is an avalanche of Chinese and Slavs, mottled with Tartars and Baltic Germans, that will put an end to the stupidities and indeed to the civilization of Europe.

[58] 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.

Becoming popular in German intellectual cliques,[62] particularly the Bayreuth Circle, in the phenomena that Walter Charles Langer described as "Gobineau Societies",[63] Gobinism was later adapted by the likes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg to forge elements of Nazi philosophy.

[65] Historians have made much of the significant philosophical gap between the pessimism of Gobineau himself, particularly his insistence that his vision was of mythical Aryans as a fallen and lost people, versus the optimism and themes of rejuvenation of the disciples and members of the Gobinism movement.

In his 1881 article Heldentum und Christentum ("Heroism and Christianity"), Wagner praised the Essai, and accepted its premise of an Aryan master race and its denunciation of miscegenation, but he denied humanity was in unstoppable decay.

[81] The American historian Paul Fortier observed it was striking the contrast between the fundamental optimism and triumphant tone expressed by Chamberlain in his 1899 book The Foundations of the 19th Century about the future of the Aryans vs. the relentlessly downbeat and gloomy message of Gobineau's Essai.

[82] Writing in April 1939, Rowbotham declared: "So after nearly a hundred years, the fantastic pessimistic philosophy of the brilliant French diplomat is seized upon and twisted to the use of a mystic demagogue who finds in the idea of the pure Aryan an excuse for thrusting civilization dangerously near back to the Dark Ages.

[84] Biddiss wrote:His racist ideology, through rooted in social and political concerns and though claiming to explain the nature of society itself, could not on his own terms effect any transformation.

In a 1906 essay, the intellectual Sílvio Romero cited Gobineau together with Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Houston Stewart Chamberlain as having proved that the blond dolichocephalic (long skulled) people of northern Europe were the best and greatest race in the entire world.

[86] Oliveira Viana in his 1920 book As populações meridionais do Brasil ("The Southern Populations of Brazil") offered lavish praise of Gobineau for his denunciation of miscegenation and his disparaging remarks about black and Indian Brazilians.

[90] Although in no way espousing his beliefs, the Baháʼí Faith recognizes Gobineau as the person who obtained the only complete manuscript of the early history of the Bábí religious movement of Persia, written by Hajji Mirzâ Jân of Kashan, who was put to death by the Persian authorities in c. 1852.

[citation needed] He is also known to students of Babism for having written the first and most influential account of the movement, displaying a fairly accurate knowledge of its history in Religions et philosophies dans l'Asie centrale.