Legitimist journalist in the 1840s, friend and adversary of Tocqueville, diplomat, mayor, general counselor, novelist, poet, and sculptor, Arthur de Gobineau is best remembered as a race theorist and the author of the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, which appeared in three volumes between 1853 and 1855 while Gobineau was posted abroad in Switzerland, Germany, and Tehran.Footnote 1 Gobineau saw race theory as the basis for a new philosophy of universal history: all factors conventionally used to account for the decline of civilizations (the corruption of morals, bad government, material forces, the loss of religious faith) were invalid; instead, “the racial question overshadows all other problems of history” and “the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.” Civilization is the result of race mixing; because white blood is a civilizing agent; because the white race is innately disposed to expand and mix with other peoples; and because race mixing entails a process of conquest, social fusion, class formation, cultural change, and institutional development. At the same time, race mixing inaugurates a process of dilution and degeneration because the infusion of inferior blood always debases the quality and vitality of the original combination. The mixture of blood, therefore, is a dialectical process leading to universal degeneration, or the gradual loss of the intrinsic value of the founding human stock—it makes civilization possible even as it plants the seed of inevitable decline. In the end, the biological unity of humanity will all but destroy the essential civilizing qualities of the white race and lead to complete and total degradation.Footnote 2
Gobineau's abrupt embrace of racism in the 1850s and his tenacious insistence on its validity in the face of withering criticism and intellectual isolation has fascinated and perplexed historians. In the 1840s, Gobineau was a fairly typical, albeit disgruntled, legitimist, known most widely for his fierce advocacy of administrative decentralization in the Revue provinciale, which he coedited with Louis de Kergorlay during the first two years of the Second Republic. Prior to the publication of the Essai the concept of race was largely absent from Gobineau's literary work and did not inform his social and political observations in any fundamental way. A number of scholars have tried to address this paradox by arguing that Gobineau's race theory expressed a more fundamental social elitism characterized by contempt for the masses, hatred for democracy, and a desire to see the nobility reclaim its rightful place at the top of the social hierarchy. In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt characterized Gobineau as “the last heir of Boulainvilliers,” referring to the eighteenth-century defender of noble privilege, who argued that the French ruling nobility was descended from the Germanic warriors who had conquered the Gauls, imposed their laws, and claimed legal primacy as a right of conquest. Arendt believed that Gobineau “feared for the fate of the aristocracy as a caste” and that his racism was both a defense of noble superiority and an explanation for the nobility's loss of its former position. George Mosse subsequently built on the notion that Gobineau's racial categories were actually social in nature by insisting that the Essai was an attempt to account for contemporary class conflicts that were leading toward the rule of the masses.Footnote 3 The most consistent proponent of this line of argument is Michael Biddiss, who insisted that race theory was secondary in Gobineau's work because it was “essentially derived from other and earlier political concerns” and simply repeated legitimist social principles in the guise of a scientific discourse designed to meet the intellectual exigencies of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 4 According to Biddiss, the Essai embodied an aristocratic class consciousness “expressed in racial terms,” allowing Gobineau to defend an embattled nobility, advocate a quasi-feudal society, and advance political conservatism by denouncing miscegenation.Footnote 5 The opposite end of the interpretive spectrum is represented by the work of Janine Buenzod, who argued that there was no continuity in Gobineau's thinking between the periods before and after the publication of the Essai because race theory was designed to answer questions about the decline of civilizations that Gobineau had not raised in his earlier work. In this view, the Essai launched Gobineau on an intellectual voyage that led him eventually to detach himself radically “from the doctrines of his party and his class,” abandoning his previous convictions and affiliations as so much “useless cargo.”Footnote 6
Existing interpretations of the origins of Gobineau's racial theories err on two counts, either by making his racism an expression of his aristocratic elitism or by severing the tie between the Essai and his royalist past. The first path of analysis misinterprets his racism as a defense of the nobility and the second tends to isolate the Essai from other aspects of his intellectual development. This paradox disappears if we discount Gobineau's role in the development of nineteenth-century racial thought and think of him as a heretical legitimist who, far from defending the social and political claims of the royalist aristocracy, turned to racial ideas in order to explain the irredeemable degeneracy of the French nobility. Like many legitimists, Gobineau equated the power of the nobility with the restoration of ancient communal liberties and blamed the social damage inflicted by the French Revolution on relentless administrative centralization. The failure of French notables to decentralize the French state in the 1830s and 1840s pointed to their loss of physical and intellectual vitality and led Gobineau to articulate a biological account of France's decline. At the same time, he never abandoned the legitimist prejudices and ideas whose failure framed his disappointments and stoked his deepening pessimism. After examining the particular nature of Gobineau's legitimism, I will explore the relative absence of racial analysis in what he wrote about the societies he encountered in his diplomatic travels in order to highlight the fact that his racial theories were tailored specifically to account for France's uniquely tragic historical development. What follows is a consideration of Gobineau's status as a disaffected legitimist, his continued attachment to conventional legitimist ideas, and his fierce criticism of the political failures of the legitimist party in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that Gobineau's racism was neither an expression of his contempt for the masses nor a result of the influence of contemporary racial science, but was primarily an effort to explain why the nobility had lost the capacity to govern. Finally, my reinterpretation of the origins of Gobineau's racism helps explain the marginal place accorded to him in the history of the French right and raises questions about the importance of his contribution to nineteenth-century racial thought.
I
Previous attempts to explain the meaning, origins, and significance of Gobineau's racism suggest the need to look more closely at Gobineau's status as a legitimist and his relationship with the legitimist party. Gobineau's father was a devoted ultra-royalist who was forced to resign his army commission after the 1830 Revolution and who refused to allow his son to serve the July Monarchy. Gobineau's daughter, Diane, recalled that she was “brought up amidst feelings of the deepest contempt for the Orléanist line.”Footnote 7 After completing his education, Gobineau took advantage of his father's connections to gain access to legitimist society, where he frequented the salon of Madame de Serre, the widow of Charles X's garde des sceaux. In 1836, he became a political journalist and began writing articles on foreign affairs for the legitimist press. His work appeared in Pierre-Antoine Berryer's France et Europe and in the Gazette de France until 1843, when he became the foreign affairs editor at La Quotidienne, hired by its proprietor in the hope that the young writer could rejuvenate an ailing publication. He was laid off in 1847, but he returned to print in September 1848 when he and Louis de Kergorlay founded the Revue provinciale, dedicated to advancing the cause of administrative decentralization, a perennial legitimist obsession after 1830. His appointment as Tocqueville's secretary saved him from the consequences of another failing journalistic enterprise and launched him on a diplomatic career that made him one of thousands of royalists who opportunistically and unenthusiastically rallied to the Second Empire.Footnote 8
Gobineau was unimpressed with his employers and disillusioned with the legitimist party almost from the moment he began collaborating with the royalist press. Referring to himself as a condottiero, he posed as a political skeptic in intellectual circles, and there is evidence among his personal letters to indicate that he turned to political journalism for fame and financial reward. When he lost his position at La Quotidienne his mother-in-law testified that the paper had never suited him and that he mostly regretted the loss of his salary.Footnote 9 In his articles, Gobineau praised the legitimists for their honor and sacrifice and made repeated professions of loyalty to the cause, but in his private correspondence he was harshly critical of the party's leaders, insisting that they lacked the unity, energy, and political skills needed to put their principles into practice. Although he criticized the party's incompetence, he did not denounce its ideas; he continued to believe that royalist doctrines were sound even as he distanced himself from the organization.Footnote 10
This consistent and long-standing embrace of legitimist ideas can best be seen in Gobineau's critique of postrevolutionary France, which combined and elaborated upon the writings of Tocqueville and Edmund Burke. Like the former, Gobineau believed that the French revolutionaries had invented nothing but had merely built on what had been created by French kings, especially in the areas of jurisprudence and administration. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Gobineau insisted that the material necessary for a restoration and revitalization of traditional institutions had survived centuries of royal despotism and that provincial life had only expired completely “on the rostrum of the Constituent Assembly,” when the revolutionaries destroyed France's ancient territorial divisions and cut the country up into “little pieces in preparation for the boiling cauldron of the Terror”:
Seventeen-eighty-nine believed that it was necessary to use an enormous landmine for what a few axe blows would have sufficed to tear down . . . Where there had once been imposing ramparts to undermine, [the Convention] only had to confront the scattered debris of flattened strongholds and step over them with the least effort.Footnote 11
As a result of this act of demolition, France became “the most administrative State in the world,” where democracy triumphed as an expanding bureaucracy sought to curry favor with a self-serving and dependent population.Footnote 12
There are three things to notice about Gobineau's critique of centralization that relate to the continuing importance of his early association with the legitimist party. First, aside from the restoration of the monarchy, decentralization was the fundamental legitimist idea, the one with the greatest practical import, and the only one (besides restoration) that entailed all the other themes that the legitimists never tired of repeating for more than half a century: hatred of 1789, suspicion of urbanization, fear that the concentration of power in Paris made revolutions easier, the growing restiveness of the masses, the neglect of agriculture, and so on. It also allowed them to condemn the Old Regime while praising the monarchy by arguing that the Revolution had cut short a fruitful effort to revitalize provincial institutions. Second, the opposition implicit in this critique between natural political institutions that develop at length and ones that “pop out of the artificially fired-up brain of a legislator” is a classic theme of traditionalism that places Gobineau in a current of thought that includes Bonald, Maurras, and Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, for whom communal liberty best safeguarded national character, and also for whom all revolutions represented acts of national self-immolation.Footnote 13 Finally, Gobineau expressed these ideas in exactly the same terms in 1848 and 1870, signaling his persistent attachment to a set of essential values which he did not abandon in the face of new experiences and intellectual preoccupations.Footnote 14
II
It is one thing to point out that Gobineau remained faithful to legitimist themes when discussing issues central to French history, but how often did these concerns enter into the judgments he made about other societies in the wake of the publication of the Essai, when there would have been a stronger inclination to see things in a racial perspective? Biddiss and others have claimed that “racist conclusions eventually came to condition all aspects of Gobineau's later thinking,”Footnote 15 but this is simply not the case. Instead, Gobineau appeared to maintain a consistently racial argument only with regard to England and France, where he saw a direct correlation between ethnic composition and political development. In Gobineau's estimation England had preserved its “Aryan essence” to an extraordinary degree because “modifications of the stock have been slower” and “less varied than in any other European country.” As a result, England had evolved more slowly than its neighbors and had been more successful in retaining its natural institutions: vigorous municipal liberties, a strong national church, a stable constitution, and a territorial aristocracy. English politics reflected this spirit of conservation: Whigs and Tories collaborated in the name of gradual development, leaving revolutionaries no opportunity to play an important role. In recent times, racial mixing had brought about the transformation of society; an influx of French blood during the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution, along with the rise of industry and the arrival of workers from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Italy, had Latinized English culture, undermined its traditions, and promoted a more rapid pace of innovation.Footnote 16
France stood at the other end of the spectrum, representing a society that was more heterogeneous and degenerate than any other, “whose original character has been effaced the most.” Before the fall of Rome, France was already a patchwork of ethnic groups, made up of Semites in the south, Gallo-Romans in the center, Celts in the west, and Germanic elements in the east, all of which had already been hybridized. Over the centuries, the political center of gravity shifted from one group to another, so that France went through a succession of phases in which its essential characteristics were modified in accordance with diverse ethnic traditions and abilities. Meanwhile, a series of invasions and migrations caused the various elements to mingle, creating a bastardized population best represented by the city of Paris, which Gobineau called “a museum of the most varied ethnological specimens.” Ethnic chaos and institutional incoherence allowed the monarchy to undermine traditional communal and provincial institutions, until the Revolution came along and swept away all obstacles to centralized power, leaving in its wake a motley and degenerate population that had lost the capacity for self-government.Footnote 17
As long as Gobineau could harmonize ethnographic development and political history, he could make his legitimist ideals work inside his racism. When this was not the case, his legitimism prevailed, and he made very little effort to apply race theory in a systematic way. Gobineau's analysis of Greece, where he served as minister to Athens in the 1860s, combined attention to the country's ethnic composition with a benevolent regard for its ability to preserve its national identity. From an ethnic standpoint, he considered the Greeks orientals, with the capacity “to entertain all at once passions that appear entirely contradictory.” With the exception of the Ionians, and especially the inhabitants of Corfu, where there were a large number of Catholics of Italian origin, the Greeks possessed an anarchic spirit that allowed them to tolerate a level of disorder in public affairs that would have imperiled the survival of a European nation.Footnote 18 Anarchy was the very essence of Greece, a state that conformed best to the country's “natural instincts,” where it created a life of “chance and jugglings” among a people physically and morally ruined by its vices.
Gobineau placed the blame for this state of affairs at the doorstep of the European powers, whose leaders had imposed a western-style parliamentary government in the wake of Greek independence that was entirely at odds with the Greek temperament. As a consequence, Greece was launched on the wrong path, saddled with a rootless constitutional system, the product of the liberal pretense that it was possible to create a new state with “pieces of paper.”Footnote 19 Since Gobineau believed in “the impotence of all attempts to set up institutions which are not suggested by the national character,” he doubted whether Greece could ever succeed in creating a workable government. During thirty years of self-rule the country was wrecked by corruption and incompetence, teetering on the edge of chaos.Footnote 20 And yet, the Greeks had managed to preserve their national character because the Turks had respected their communal liberties and because the Greek War of Independence was not a revolution but a “simple demand for rights.” Modern Greece, therefore, emerged as a living nation, governed by its own laws (no matter now defective) and devoted to its particular genius. Unlike the French, the Greeks had no penchant for regicide, rationalism, and political experimentation.Footnote 21 “Since 1829 most of the people have had no perception that the Turkish regime had disappeared.” The Greek peasantry remained conservative and happily supported the new monarchy, did not demand “any right whatsoever to express its opinion on matters of State,” respected authority, and followed the landowners’ lead in all regards. Gobineau was especially impressed with the ability of the Greeks to live without rules or scruples, with no clear direction or care for the future. Outside the world of politics, he considered them patient, amiable, creative, and sincere.Footnote 22
But none of this had anything to do with race: Greek political anarchy was the result of a foreign constitution, and the diversity of Greece's ethnic composition did not alter the capacity of the people to preserve its traditions. The ancient Greek nationality had ceased to exist at the time of the Romans; since then, successive barbarian invasions had given modern Greece one of the most heterogeneous populations in Europe, made up of Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Arabs, Slavs, and Italians, with only a few Ionian islands and Thessalonika having an almost uniformly Greek population. Nevertheless, Gobineau declared that the people of Greece were more intelligent, cultivated, and industrious than all the other peoples of the Balkans, and that Greece was destined to play a civilizing role in the entire Danubian region.Footnote 23
Race played an equally ambiguous and marginal role in Gobineau's reaction to Sweden, where he served as minister from 1872 to 1876. He found Sweden charming and adorable, an “enchanting country . . . with pretty villages of red-painted wooden houses” filled with people who were busy, sensible, and wise. He told his sister that he considered the Scandinavian peoples of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark “the three greatest in the world.” Racial prejudice predisposed Gobineau to admire the Swedes, whom he believed to have retained many vital Germanic elements that were evident in attractive, fine, and regular features. At the same time, he conceded that modern Scandinavia had been corrupted by a large quantity of Latin blood and that southerners were especially ugly as a result of having been exposed to the most intense immigration. Unlike Greece, where parliamentary life was dominated by “gnawing rodents,” Sweden was politically stable, with a competent and conservative political class that was almost uniquely preoccupied with economic matters.Footnote 24 What Gobineau found most impressive about the Swedes was their ability to hold on to their original pagan mentality. Scandinavians had combined a “general attachment to ancient mythology” and a “profound poetic sentiment” with a practical and judicious spirit. They had never had much zeal for the Catholic faith and the lack of fanaticism with which they embraced the religion of Luther registered an underlying passion for the ancient Nordic gods.Footnote 25 At the same time, Gobineau believed that the Scandinavian social structure encouraged the survival of the heroic virtues of the Middle Ages; living in isolated villages, surrounded by a pristine landscape, and free to be left alone, the peasantry had been able to preserve the characteristic mores of the Aryan race: chivalry, liberty, love of community, and fidelity to the group.Footnote 26
Gobineau set aside the racial determinism of the Essai in his reflections on Sweden and Greece because both countries exemplified an idea that was much closer to his heart, and much closer to the point of the animus he felt for France: people who retained the fortitude to preserve their traditions did not need strong states. Like the Greeks, the Swedes were able “to live without rules” because social cohesion did not require the intervention of coercive authority or passive obedience to an army of bureaucrats. The Greeks displayed an “unlimited carelessness” while in Sweden “you could almost sleep in the streets, leaving your doors open and your strongbox at the disposal of passers-by, and nothing would be missing.”Footnote 27 Sweden suffered none of the political maladies found on the European continent; social relations were cordial and revolutionary violence did not exist; workers acted in concert with employers without threatening strikes, employers cared about their workers, and the International struggled to find recruits. In short, the country enjoyed “the most suitable social situation in the world” because the absence of revolutionary agitation expressed an underlying harmony that was both ancient and natural.Footnote 28
Gobineau found among the Irish fishermen of Newfoundland the same anti-statist and utopian habits that he admired among the Swedes and the Greeks. The only authority recognized in the town of St George, along Newfoundland's French shore, was that of the priest: “these good Irishmen live entirely without masters, magistrates, constables or police officers, in short without any law.” He attributed this state of affairs not to race but to a
wild and odious climate, a forbidding landscape, the choice between poverty and dangerous toil, no amusement, no pleasure, no money, fortune and ambition equally impossible, and the only cheerful prospect being of the simplest and most rudimentary nature; this apparently is what succeeds best in making men skilled in exercising absolute liberty without indulging in excesses, and in showing tolerance toward each other.Footnote 29
Life on the French shore sprang not from “the dreams of philosophers” and “inventors of cities or ideal republics” but from environmental factors that toughened men's resolve to dominate an unforgiving world. Such conditions were powerful enough to restore lost racial characteristics, as was the case among the hunters of the Bay of Islands, who rediscovered “the healthy and robust vigor of [their] Celtic ancestors.” The settlers whom he encountered in St Pierre were “French like us” but seemed to come from another age, belonging to “another society” by virtue of “the kind of life [they] lead,” a life that discouraged the production of revolutions “aspiring to change the direction or order of society, or to elevate the lowly.” In all its aspects, Gobineau's analysis of Newfoundland contradicted the central theoretical import of his race theory: he argued that the environment should dictate the region's institutions and commercial policies; he believed that the English and Acadian settlers were “well suited to intermarriage”; he asserted that ethnic diversity did not promote republican and egalitarian principles and that the mixing of Basque and Norman blood at St Pierre did not contribute to social disorder; and he insisted that the maritime populations of England were more degenerate than the provincial population of France because liberalism and materialism had lowered the horizons and sapped the discipline of the former, while the latter had retained a superior morality and were more highly educated.Footnote 30
There is no doubt that Gobineau often synthesized racism and traditionalism in the Essai and in many of his subsequent writings. He asserted that racial homogeneity went hand in hand with political stability (and vice versa), he argued that mixed races produced equally hybrid civilizations, and he theorized that democracy appeared when race mixing reached a certain threshold, so that it was merely the political expression of an inextricable ethnic confusion.Footnote 31 In the Essai Gobineau tried to racialize the European class structure by representing the nobles as comprising “the victorious race,” the bourgeoisie as composed of “crossbreeds related to the superior stock,” and the people as made up of “an inferior human variety.”Footnote 32 From this perspective, he was able to write about social processes in racial terms: the passage from aristocracy to democracy, and from feudalism to capitalism, was a function of the racial degradation of the nobility; all that happened in between represented “the different phases of the amalgamation of the races.” The rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with the advent of a commercial and industrial economy, which stimulated the migration of labor and stirred the racial pot. The fusion of the races led to the triumph of egalitarian principles and centralized democratic states.Footnote 33 In this sense, Paris was always paradigmatic of Gobineau's entire project:
Paris, whose population is assuredly an epitomization of the most varied ethnic specimens, no longer had any motive for understanding, loving, or respecting any tradition . . . This great capital, this tower of Babel, broke with the past . . . and drew France into myriad experimentations with doctrines that were most foreign to its ancient customs.Footnote 34
III
It nevertheless seems strange that ethnic confusion in France should lead to a loss of national traditions while a similar ethnic hybridity in Greece should fail to have analogous results. One has to wonder whether racial analysis was really the point of all these pompous ruminations. As we have seen, Arendt, Mosse, and Biddiss attempted to explain Gobineau's inconsistencies by arguing that he was using racial categories to defend noble superiority and account for contemporary class conflict.Footnote 35 Biddiss maintained that the interdependence of race ideology and legitimist social concerns “is the key to understanding the later evolution” of Gobineau's thought.Footnote 36 But none of these interpretations make clear whether Gobineau was trying to make class and race inseparable, or whether he was using race as a gloss for his deeper commitment to conservative principles. Why would he go to such lengths to express his primary concerns in terms that complicated and muddled his principal message? Biddiss suggested that he was compelled to push all his writings subsequent to the Essai in a racial direction in order to defend an all-embracing explanation of modern materialism, egalitarianism, and democracy, but this fails to account for the fact that race is absent from many of his later writings and correspondence.Footnote 37 Buenzod emphatically denied that Gobineau's concept of race had anything to do with the fortunes of a particular class and pointed persuasively to the central theme of Les Pléïades (1874), where Gobineau imagined a contemporary world in which Aryan blood had become so widely diffused that it was possible for a small number of superior individuals to arise anywhere “in whatever social position they have been born.”Footnote 38
Literary scholars have tended to look at the Essai through the prism of Gobineau's novels and travel writings and have been inclined to see his racism as a literary device, or as a way of imagining the world from the posture of a scientist in order to be able to claim an Olympian perspective. Jean Boissel argued that Gobineau's race theory was a gesture of refusal and negation, allowing him to break culturally and ideologically with his times. The Essai, he wrote, “is a radical contestation of the dogmas of the century” that should be regarded as “a catalogue of heresies.” In it, Gobineau used racism to strike at the core of liberal orthodoxy: individual liberty, progress, social reform, the benefits of prosperity, the advantages of commerce, the primacy of the nation state, the right of France to dominate Europe, and the fitness of Europe to dominate the world.Footnote 39 From this perspective, Gobineau's racism was essentially an aesthetic rather than a rational enterprise because it claimed to reveal “hidden causes” far beyond the reach of any premise susceptible to scientific verification.Footnote 40 The white race had already lost its purity at the time of Christ and had been in decline for a thousand years before French kings began to centralize and revolutionaries began to contemplate an alternative society. The cause of human decadence was born with the human race, which was headed inexorably toward its miserable fate. What better way to arm oneself against the platitudes of one's own time?
The problem with this line of argument is that it does not address the paradox raised by the contrasting interpretations of Biddiss and Buenzod: did Gobineau abandon his legitimist social principles or did they serve as the primary message of his racism? In order to address this problem, it may be more fruitful to think of Gobineau as a disaffected legitimist rather than a legitimist defector or a legitimist doppelgänger, someone whose attitude toward the legitimist party was comparable to that of a believer who remained so attached to certain dogmas that he rejected the church in order more freely and forcefully to affirm the purity of the faith. On the one hand, he continued to express a number of conventional legitimist convictions after the publication of the Essai, extolling the royalists as selfless, honorable, and disinterested guardians of traditions, praising the Bourbon Restoration as a time of good sense and moderation, and deriding the July Monarchy as a government of bankers that oversaw a decline in French prestige.Footnote 41 He consistently bemoaned the civic abdication of the nobility, denounced centralization, and contrasted the wholesome life of the provinces with the depravity of Paris. On the other hand, some of his views were highly unorthodox, and found virtually no echo within more mainstream legitimist circles. Unlike most royalists, Gobineau never made his peace with representative government, seeing it as suitable only for “politicking” over “narrow-minded questions.” The legitimist party was supposed to transcend partisan considerations and embody the true interests of the nation, so Gobineau never stopped deriding its leaders for behaving like politicians and undermining its mission. His main complaint against the party in the 1840s had been that it was weak, divided, and ineffective; after the failure of the campaign to restore the monarchy in the 1870s, he made a similar case, accusing the party of squandering its electoral victory for lack of a definite program, claiming that the public showed “more confidence in the royalists than the royalists showed in themselves.”Footnote 42
Similarly, his views on decentralization were far more radical than the mundane administrative and jurisdictional adjustments advocated by most of the legitimists who were preoccupied with the question. Gobineau not only criticized the royalists for accepting the administrative status quo in the hope of one day occupying political power, he also insisted that the model of a decentralized monarchy ought to be the Holy Roman Empire, where free nobles were sovereign on their own lands, under the protection of ancient Germanic law. Like most legitimists, Gobineau was not nostalgic for the absolutism of the Old Regime; like many of them, he dreamed of a time when the monarchy had not sought to annihilate provincial and communal liberties. But for Gobineau, such a monarchy had existed only in feudal times, as far back as the twelfth century. As he told Tocqueville, “the father of the revolutionaries was Philippe the Fair.”Footnote 43
After 1850, Gobineau and the legitimists parted company on a number of fundamental questions involving more than issues of competence and political strategy. Both agreed that France was a nation in decline; what drove them apart was the question of whether the restoration of the monarchy would bring about a fundamental change of course. Most legitimists had come to see the vicissitudes and catastrophes of the nineteenth century as the consequences of the Revolution or as divine punishment for the sins of materialism and secularization. Neither of these perspectives excluded the other and both allowed for the possibility of regeneration, either through institutional reform or through expiation and redemption leading to the restoration of Pope and king. But Gobineau had always been an adversary of providentialism and his experience as editor of the Revue provinciale and as an observer of the rise and fall of the Second Republic had led him to the conclusion that the institutional foundations for a decentralized monarchy were irredeemably lost and that the will and ability of the present political class to reestablish local liberties did not exist.Footnote 44 In the 1840s, Gobineau ridiculed the directors of the royalist press for their infatuation with the ideas of Joseph de Maistre, insisting that providentialism had no meaning from a political perspective, where the only thing that mattered was effectiveness. In the Essai he continued to stress the separation of religion and secular affairs by insisting that “irreligion has no political reality at all,” and by arguing that even though the “finger of God” was present in “the conduct of the world,” it was up to science to determine “the ways in which the Divine will move.” He also explicitly rejected the idea that nations undergoing decline or destruction were “expiating the sin they committed in deserting the faith of their fathers.”Footnote 45 According to Gobineau, de Maistre and Louis de Bonald were deceived in thinking that the Revolution was only an abnormal deviation from a pristine state to which France was destined to return by the actions of a “future avenger.”Footnote 46 History was devoid of any religious element; degeneration was caused by natural factors that could not be reversed by supernatural ones.
Although Gobineau criticized providentialism for crippling the political aptitude of the royalists, the Essai contained no practical recommendations regarding politics, social reform, or institutional change; it simply argued that the course of history is one of inexorable decadence and that “when a people is dying, nothing can regenerate it.” Once he determined in the 1850s that France's social maladies were due to “hidden causes” and “remote reasons,” he abandoned any effort to envision a successful modern society.Footnote 47 Unlike most legitimists, Gobineau did not see the crisis of 1870–71 as a chastisement reserved by God for a people who had broken with its religious traditions. Instead, he wrote of the defeat of the French as a general calamity, as France's “climactic year,” telling his sister after the destruction of the Commune,
Everything is finished, the play is over, the death agony has begun, and we are now like all the other Latin nations, drifting. I was going to calculate our chances for regeneration, but that would be foolish. This is a lost country; this is a debased and incurable race.Footnote 48
He therefore saw no reason to support the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the 1870s because he was sure that it would do no good and that the legitimists and Orleanists who were trying to negotiate a constitutional settlement were like doctors applying useless remedies to a dying patient.Footnote 49
Back in the 1850s, Tocqueville had called Gobineau a fatalist and had criticized him for contributing to the “spiritual lassitude” of the times, as if the most disturbing thing about the Essai was its potential to sap the energy that contemporaries needed to take on the problems of the day.Footnote 50 But Gobineau's real sin was to have thumbed his nose at divine mercy by insisting that humanity could not escape its mortal condition, thereby denying the regenerative power of Catholic moralization. Whatever his religious inclination may have been in the past, it is clear that in the latter part of his life Gobineau was not a Christian: his writings contradicted the dogma of the unity of the human race and were at odds with the Christian perspective that made the Incarnation the beginning of a new era in human history. When his sister told him in 1874 that “we are in one of these periods when souls who have faith and energy must steel themselves against the currents that threaten to carry away all that is just and true” and that he should “be careful not to rattle believers more than they already are,” he responded that he could respect a god who chastised arbitrarily but he could not respect one who did so in the name of justice, because justice was “accessible to reason” and any god who held himself up to human scrutiny was impotent.Footnote 51
The theme of decadence was a ubiquitous motif in nineteenth-century French literature and political discourse. After the ordeal of the Second Republic many intellectuals and public figures became disgusted with developments in their country and embraced a disdainful pessimism that was often expressed in a nostalgia for the past.Footnote 52 During the Second Empire, Catholics and legitimists ruminated darkly on the decline of the nation and wrote alarmingly about the rise of socialism, democracy, materialism, and secular thought. Not long before the Essai appeared, Claude Raudot, a legitimist deputy to the National Assembly, published a widely read book entitled De la Décadence de la France, in which he documented France's relative decline in terms of population, military power, wealth, financial solvency, health, and morality, and argued that such trends were almost entirely due to excessive centralization. Like Gobineau, Raudot railed against the inordinate influence of Paris, and blamed centralization for undermining the French economy, sapping France's capacity for self-government, engendering communistic ideas, and perpetuating political instability.Footnote 53 Raudot represented the Yonne in the National Assembly from 1848 to 1851 and again during the first years of the Third Republic. In the interval, along with a number of prominent legitimists, Orleanists, and moderate republicans, he served as a member of the Commission of 1870, charged by Napoleon III to study the question of decentralization.Footnote 54 While Raudot's book successfully reflected mainstream conservative thinking, Gobineau's work was a failure, despite the fact that he was hoping to give his contemporaries a vast work of synthesis that would respond to the intellectual needs of the moment. For one thing, Gobineau's diagnosis of the problem of decadence was entirely at odds with right-wing opinion. In the opening theoretical chapters of the Essai he explicitly rejected arguments that attributed the decadence of nations and civilizations to immorality, irreligion, or bad government. He cited examples of nations prospering under detestable governments and of great empires that collapsed in the face of a general adherence to faith. He was especially anxious to show that Christianity had neither the power to create civilization nor the capacity to modify the social and political features of the nations it converted. Christian precepts could soften mores, promote charity, reduce violence, elevate minds, purify morals, and weaken the corrosive vices that hampered material progress, but it could not alter the biological reality of a people.Footnote 55 Moreover, Gobineau declared that questions concerning forms of government were primarily related to whether or not societies would enjoy a greater or lesser degree of material prosperity. Wars, revolutions, and other disturbing contemporary events were symptoms of decadence but they were not subject to political remedies because they had their roots in “hidden causes” and “elemental conditions which are independent of politics.”Footnote 56 Whereas Gobineau offered no guidance to contemporary questions, Raudot traced the problem of decadence to causes that could be ameliorated and spent the better part of his tenure as a legislator crafting detailed plans designed to free departmental and municipal councils from the tutelage of the central government.Footnote 57
IV
Raudot defined decadence as a decrease in the material and cultural indices of social health and worried about the ways in which industrial labor in big cities brutalized and degraded workers. This definition was consistent with the concept of degeneration being elaborated in scientific circles, where there was a tendency to link transmissible biological defects with environmental factors, poor diet, and immorality.Footnote 58 By contrast, Gobineau tied the concept to miscegenation and used it to describe the difference between the “intrinsic value” of a founding race of conquering heroes and the degraded nature of individuals in contemporary society. By adjusting the definition to account for the decline of entire populations, he developed a concept of degeneration that encompassed not just the poor but the upper classes as well.Footnote 59 If we set aside the biological element, it seems clear that Gobineau's racism was the product of his desire to explain why French nobles had lost the energy and capacity to govern. His eventual answer (that they had lost their original racial purity) does not diminish the extent to which his initial concern shaped the trajectory of his thought.Footnote 60 This perspective also helps resolve the contradictory conclusions of Biddiss and Buenzod, wherein the former argued that Gobineau's racism was a continuation of his legitimism while the latter insisted that it marked a clean break with his political past. Biddiss was right to insist that Gobineau's legitimism was relevant to his race theory insofar as his ideological disaffection provided the conceptual framework for the Essai, but he was far off the mark in saying that Gobineau was trying to defend the social interests of the nobility. Buenzod was correct to deny that his racism was a surreptitious continuation of his earlier ideological inclinations, but she was wrong to draw a sharp distinction between his legitimism and his subsequent racist views.
There are two instances in Gobineau's correspondence where he tried to explain the motivation that lay behind the Essai. One occurs in a letter to Tocqueville written in November 1856, where he linked his work to the fact that he had seen the Revolution of 1848 with his own eyes and had been compelled by the disgust he felt for “those dirty shirts” to “exaggerate . . . my notions of what is just and what is true.” The other appears in a letter to Count von Prokesch-Osten, also written in 1856, in which he described his state of mind at the time the Essai was written as “a hatred for democracy and its weapon, the Revolution, which I satisfied by showing, in a variety of ways, where revolution and democracy come from and where they are going.”Footnote 61 Biddiss cited these statements to support the conclusion that Gobineau's social ideas justified and were paramount in “the development of a racial explanation,” but the statements themselves do not correspond to the logic of Gobineau's racial theory, which links the decline of civilizations to the successive loss of purity among conquering races.Footnote 62 Gobineau did not hate democracy any more after 1850 than he had before, and he was not the only conservative to react with fierce hysteria to the sight of the masses surging in the streets. The June Days frightened a broad cross-section of the French elite, but only Gobineau responded by condemning miscegenation, and he did not need to witness revolution to conclude that the masses were intrinsically inferior. What bothered him about revolution and democracy was not the threat they posed to the interest of property owners but the fact that they revealed the failure of superior individuals to control the weak and the mediocre.
These considerations suggest that the intellectual turning point in Gobineau's life came four or five years before he began writing the Essai, that his racial theory was closely linked to the doubts he had about the legitimist leadership in the 1840s, and that the disgust he recalled feeling in 1856 was really directed at the notables, who had failed to revive local liberties after 1848. In the articles he wrote for the Revue provinciale in 1848 and 1849, Gobineau was quite pragmatic about a number of questions concerning decentralization. He was willing to entertain a wide variety of organizational plans; he explored the possibility of reviving past institutions, changing the nature of existing municipal and departmental councils, and borrowing models from abroad. He did not insist that a specific social group ought to govern at the local level and he remained agnostic on the question of whether the central government should be a monarchy or a republic. But all of his hopes and plans assumed the existence of men capable of restoring local liberties that had been lost for centuries, men bold enough to assume their place in society. He worried that his contemporaries had lost a knowledge of real liberty but he was still willing to believe at the time that an appeal to reason would produce a great leap in civic responsibility that would rapidly induce a recovery of the habits necessary for the restoration of local autonomy.Footnote 63 In effect, Gobineau had conceived a fantastic dream, a sort of Leninist acceleration of Tocqueville's thesis on the success of local government in the United States, the failure of which he regarded as proof that the French elite had lost its energy and its instinct for the personal liberty and independence that had colored the heroic deeds of a distant past. The Essai began with a reference to the revolutions of 1848 and was the mature expression of Gobineau's search for answers to the questions raised in his mind by the events and disappointments of that year.
From an intellectual standpoint the interval between 1848 and the publication of the Essai was marked by two seemingly significant developments: the revision of the epic poem Manfredine and Gobineau's growing interest in anthropology and physiology. Scholars have seen the former as a transitional text and have pointed to the latter to indicate the contextual importance of contemporary intellectual trends. Conceived in 1838 and finished in its first draft in 1845, Manfredine was extensively rewritten between 1848 and 1850 “under the influence of events.”Footnote 64 The poem intertwines two unrelated stories, one describing the Neapolitan revolt against the Spanish in the seventeenth century under the leadership of a fisherman named Masaniello and the other depicting the struggles of the title character, the daughter of a Sicilian lord descended from the Vikings who owes all her virtues to the conquering Norman blood that flows in her veins. Biddiss and Buenzod both agree that the poem registered the effects of 1848 on Gobineau's thinking and that it marked an essential step in the formation of his racial doctrines, the one because it combined racial language with expressions of “social alienation,” the other because it foreshadowed many of the themes of the Essai, especially Germanic superiority and contempt for the masses.Footnote 65 But neither of these conclusions seems convincing: the novelty of racial language in Manfredine does not explain why racism constituted a response to 1848, and the juxtaposition of Nordic courage with the degenerate mob suggests not so much the inequality of human races as the inability of superior individuals to hold back the democratic tide. Manfredine's qualities were her own, those of an isolated individual, and not those of the Neapolitan elite, whom she found weak and degenerate. The most important thing about the poem was that it was abandoned in 1850 so that Gobineau could develop his thoughts in a more systematic form. It was at this point that he turned to scientific literature and began to correspond with a number of archaeologists searching for bibliographical information while studying the works of the French physician and pathologist Xavier Bichat and the German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach.Footnote 66 It would be difficult to argue that the Essai was a typical product of the age of Darwin, Marx, and Comte. On the one hand, Gobineau claimed to base his findings on new discoveries concerning the fate of vanished civilizations, made possible by the light cast on the distant past by science and its recently “purified” methods. The publication of the Essai, moreover, coincided with the development of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the controversies over American slavery, and the ongoing debate in anthropology between monogenists and polygenists. Gobineau's ideas struck Tocqueville as belonging to “the family of materialist theories” that sought an all-embracing explanation of human history based on laws analogous to those at work in the physical world.Footnote 67 On the other hand, Gobineau used scientific sources to confirm an initial historical hypothesis whose exposition he hoped to make as rigorously objective as possible. He did not try to synthesize current conceptions of race, summarize contemporary race science, or analyze existing literature concerning the role of racial factors in human history. He hastily compiled the research necessary to sustain his thesis only after he had completed the first “theoretical” volume of the Essai. As he told Prokesch-Osten in 1856, the “erudition of the Essai” was only a means to an end, that of supporting a previously adopted political position. “I began to write this book in Berne because I was very much at loose ends and because I wanted to see demonstrated for my own eyes the rightness of a few principal ideas, the consequence of which I only perceived once the book was finished.”Footnote 68
It has also been argued that Gobineau's work was not original and that he borrowed heavily and without attribution from the writings of Victor Courtet de l'Isle (1813–67), the Saint-Simonian author of La Science politique fondée sur la science de l'homme (1837) who served as secretary of the Société ethnographique de Paris in the 1840s. According to Jean Boissel, Gobineau must have known of Courtet's work because they had a number of associates in common and because they moved in parallel if not identical social and intellectual circles. Although Gobineau never cited Courtet in the Essai, he read many of the same authors and referred to the work of scholars who had read Courtet.Footnote 69 But the question at hand concerns not the originality of the Essai but its place in Gobineau's larger intellectual trajectory. As Boissel makes clear, if Gobineau borrowed Courtet's ideas he also inverted them by making “the dialectic of race mixing” the key to civilizational decline rather than the cause of social improvement. For Courtet, the mingling of blood anchored the revolutionary principles of 1789 in the natural order: as the upper classes mixed with the lower, the quality of the latter was ameliorated; as a result, social inequality lessened and the privileges of the former began to disappear. The biological equalization of social groups guaranteed social progress by promoting the emancipation of the poor.Footnote 70 Gobineau may have intentionally misled the public by concealing his reliance on Courtet, but the manner of his appropriation suggests that he was more interested in refuting revolutionary ideology by discovering a positive cause for progressive decline than in adding his voice to the elaboration of racial science. The appropriation of concepts drawn from the natural and social sciences made the Essai different from all of Gobineau's previous (and most of his subsequent) writings; it increased the book's enigmatic quality and made it seem in retrospect like a fundamental shift that left the status of his earlier preoccupations in question. But Gobineau never set out to discover the physiological and anthropological basis of human inequality; rather, he wanted to explain why the heroic civilizations of the past had lost their energy and vitality and he was determined to work out the implications of this premise because his observations of the royalist party in the 1840s and the failure of his decentralist hopes after 1848 convinced him that French elites were degenerate.
Gobineau's logic on this score ran as follows. France had never had an aristocracy (or a Tory party) because French law had never given the nobility the hereditary right to participate in the legislative process.Footnote 71 Instead, the traditions of France's upper classes were based primarily on the power of seigneurs to act as legislators on their own domains. The conditions of life during the Middle Ages required that the law be enforced by men who were “deliberate, violent, and quick with their hands,” so that the social organization took on features “that were rather more like military discipline than a well-regulated arrangement.” As a consequence, the preservation of the ancient liberties of the nobility depended not on institutions or legal guarantees but on the will and virtue of certain individuals who combined an innate sense of superiority toward the masses with the determination to prevent royal power from going beyond certain limits fixed by national traditions. The ancestors of contemporary nobles established their authority in a society that was brutal and harsh; the laws they crafted were made “for solid men, wearing chain mail on their skin and the iron in their beliefs on their hearts, and not for the enervated weaklings we are today.”Footnote 72 If local liberties could not be restored in France, it must have meant that such men were not only gone but had also not been replaced by men of a similar caliber. If such men no longer existed, what had become of them? Gobineau reasoned that a great and glorious civilization would continue as such if men and women remained of equal value in terms of vigor and intelligence and if those qualities were passed down from one generation to the next. But this was not possible because human societies collided and intermingled, setting in motion the inexorable process by which the infusion of inferior blood lowered the intrinsic quality of all members of the new community, dragging everyone down to a more degraded level. This is where Gobineau parted company with Courtet and with earlier French historians like Boulainvilliers and Augustin Thierry, both of whom suggested that one race (either Frankish or Gallo-Roman) would inevitably come to dominate the other. This was also the line of reasoning that transformed the royalist fantasy of a feudal confederation of autonomous seigneurs into an uncompromising racial determinism. For Buenzod, this shift was a sort of apostasy that retrospectively made Gobineau's earlier convictions seem illusory. But Gobineau was less an apostate than a heretic who left the church in order to preserve the romantic vision at the core of his faith.Footnote 73
By focusing on the concerns that lay behind Gobineau's racism rather than on the content of the Essai, his overall intellectual trajectory seems less contradictory. For one thing, it puts the doubts he expressed about the legitimist party in the 1840s in a different light because it underscores that it was the entropy of the royalists and not their ideas that made him question his beliefs. As he told his father in 1843, “Our country is in its Roman decadence. Where there is no longer an aristocracy worthy of itself, a country dies. Our nobles are foolish and conceited cowards. I no longer believe in anything nor do I have any opinions.”Footnote 74 It is also clear that Gobineau supported the Second Empire out of despair rather then conviction, having concluded that no other regime was possible in a society where the provinces could not stand up to the capital and where excessive centralization had destroyed the capacity for self-government.Footnote 75 Gobineau's political philosophy in the wake of the Essai illustrates how he frequently returned to themes that his racial theories should have rendered superfluous. In the 1870s, he continued to write about the ways in which the rise of the modern state weakened and discredited the nobility and he justified his enduring preference for dictatorship on the grounds that the upper classes, “especially since the last forty years,” were no longer morally or physically fit “to live in the conditions that its historical grandeur, its territorial possessions, its percentage of the population, and its wealth gives it the duty to demand.” When the “native spheres of authority” have lost confidence and will, “it can be affirmed with certitude and sustained with all the faith due to a mathematical proposition that power will henceforth belong to the first lance corporal who walks by.”Footnote 76 In Les Pléïades, Gobineau personified contemporary aristocratic impotence and self-delusion in the character of Henry de Gennevilliers, a conservative who worked hard to solve social problems which had no remedy, whose politics consisted of perpetual indecision, and who could not bring himself to admit that his beliefs “rested on a sandy foundation composed of great sweetness of soul, timid honesty, pious phrases, much weakness and a few doubts that he had been unable entirely to bury beneath a layer of trenchant dogmatism.”Footnote 77
As with his commentary on Sweden, Greece, and Newfoundland, and in his foreign encounters generally, it often seems as if Gobineau developed two separate modes of explanation, one derived from a legitimist critique of contemporary France, and the other from his racial theories regarding the decline of civilizations. At times, these two discourses were used simultaneously or in parallel; at other times one or the other could be entirely absent, so that Gobineau's racism often seems contradictory and inconsistent. This problem never arose with regard to the history of France because France was the prototype for a theory that eventually encompassed the entire human race; it was the only specific case in which the biological and sociological narratives he constructed could be perfectly intertwined. In the Essai, Gobineau recapitulated and revised the story he had told in his earlier critique of centralization. “An ethnic fatality” had made France “the most administrative state in the world.” Roman civilization passed from Italy to France, where it brought about the birth of cities, commerce, and the bourgeoisie, who connived with the monarchy to extend royal power, elevate the status of the lower classes, and undermine the power and authority of the nobles. Meanwhile, the ethnic decomposition of the French nobility had begun at the dawn of the Merovingian period, when the German aristocrats of the highest degree (les leudes) “mixed their blood with the Gallo-Roman nobility.” The Revolution of 1789 finished the process by bringing about the ultimate triumph of the “romanized” and anarchic elements of the population, who set out to destroy once and for all the nation's historic institutions along with the political role of a traditional elite that was already too degraded to resist.Footnote 78 Gobineau was then compelled to universalize this story because he wanted to know whether the degeneration he saw manifest in the events of the mid-nineteenth century was temporary or irreversible, so he turned to studying the decline of past civilizations. In the Essai, human history took on the appearance of the history of France writ large. Societies disintegrated as the mixing of races produced such a variety of hybrids that the same blood flowed in the veins of the nobles and the rabble. As time passed, the former could not hold the line against the latter, and the most degenerate elements gained the upper hand. In this way, according to Arendt, Gobineau “invented racism almost by accident,” identifying “step by step . . . the fall of his caste with the fall of France, then of Western civilization, and then of the whole of mankind.”Footnote 79
V
After the publication of the Essai and for a long time to come, Gobineau failed to find a home on the French right because he was neither a Catholic, a nationalist, nor a populist. His race theory was at odds with the universalism of both the royalists and the republicans.Footnote 80 The Essai went largely unnoticed in his lifetime. As far as I can tell, it was never discussed in the royalist press or reviewed in Le Correspondant, a liberal Catholic journal which printed the work of prominent legitimists and published an article by Gobineau on primary education in Sweden in 1873.Footnote 81 Cornélie Renan spoke well of Gobineau in various salons and tried to get her husband to secure reviews of the Essai in prominent journals, but Renan himself, along with Tocqueville and Mérimée, gave it a poor reception. Gobineau asked Adolphe de Circourt to get a few favorable reviews placed in the press, but, beginning in 1854, the Essai was listed on only two book registers, one of which appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung. Most subsequent attention came from Germany, leading Gobineau to conclude that the French were too frivolous to read what he had written and were disappointed because he had not demonstrated that they were “the leading people in the world.”Footnote 82 Among the general public and the scientific community, the book was greeted with chilly silence, although the anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages included a long and unfavorable discussion of it in a review essay published in the Revue des deux mondes.Footnote 83 For Gobineau, the lack of attention was a bitter pill: he admitted to Tocqueville that he “would like to be discussed seriously in my country” so that he could prove that he was right. Mérimée told him that there were many people in France who wanted to burn him alive, and Alfred Maury, a librarian at the Institut and a member of the Société ethnographique de Paris, wrote dismissively of the Essai on three occasions in the Athenaeum français.Footnote 84 By Gobineau's death in 1882, the Essai had languished without republication for three decades, only to appear in a second and third edition in 1884, when race theory and anti-Semitism were becoming more prevalent.
Gobineau has not fared well with the leading lights of right-wing nationalism in France either. Maurice Barrès attacked him for supporting a cosmopolitan nobility rather than national unity and Jacques Bainville of Action française wrote that Gobinism meant suicide for any nation that accepted his system. “Gobinism,” he observed, “would be disgusted by France because of the disparity of its origins. So why would anyone want to let M. de G. pass for a precursor or master of nationalism!” The position of Charles Maurras was a bit more ambiguous: on the one hand he was repelled by Gobineau's “Germanism” and insisted that Gobineau was wrong to believe that governments had nothing to do with the dissolution of societies; on the other hand, he was a xenophobe and anti-Semite who tended to define nationality in ethnic as well as historical terms. Maurras contemplated but ultimately rejected the notion that politics could be understood by using biological and physiological concepts. He believed that “superior elements” were destined to rule, but he admitted that “an aristocracy can be formed of quite diverse blood” and that the contribution of blood to the quality of a dynasty or a ruling class was still “hidden in a profound mystery.” Moreover, he was convinced that Gobineau's ideas contributed to the triumph of democracy because they exalted Germans, who had made the Reformation, spawned individualism, and heralded the outbreak of the French Revolution.Footnote 85
By rejecting the efficacy of politics, Gobineau gave royalists no reason to embrace his ideas. He also pursued a line of reasoning that put him at odds with various strains of nineteenth-century racial thought. Consequently, his influence on the development of racial theory has been exaggerated and his ideas have been routinely misconstrued. Gobineau may have been familiar with the work of aristocratic and liberal historians who interpreted French history as a matter of race, but he did not intervene systematically in this debate. His obsession with the degeneracy of the nobility set him apart from Boulainvilliers and the comte de Montlosier while his lamentations for a lost race of princes contradicted Thierry's use of race conflict as a social and political metaphor, the point of which was to claim victory for “the sons of the men of the third estate.”Footnote 86 Saint-Simonian race thinkers like Courtet and Gustave d'Eichthal ignored Gobineau, like most French ethnologists and anthropologists, and generally embraced a concept of human races that was hierarchical, organic, and complementary, believing that crossbreeding could have beneficial and progressive consequences. Eichthal favored intermarriage between blacks and whites and admitted that “the offspring of distant human varieties, such as mulattos, had a great future, since they were as intelligent as whites and could flourish in the tropics.”Footnote 87 Among nineteenth-century ethnographers and anthropologists concerned with studying the biology of human variation, Gobineau's arguments fit awkwardly within a family of racial ideas associated with typological theorists such as J. C. Nott, George Gliddon, and Robert Knox, who assumed that there were distinct human groups with permanent differences that were both physical and cultural. This school of thought was superseded less than five years after the publication of the Essai by Charles Darwin, who demonstrated that permanent types did not exist because species evolved through variations brought about by the struggle for existence among individuals.Footnote 88
Gobineau's influence on German racism has been repeatedly overstated as the result of his membership in Richard Wagner's circle, the establishment in 1894 of a Gobineau Society by a leading pan-Germanist, and the frequent and misleading conflation of the Essai with Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900), which used anthropological, historical, and scientific erudition to proclaim the superiority of the German nation and the Aryan race. Gobineau was the first to theorize that race was the deciding factor in history and the precursors of Nazism repeated some of his ideas, but his principle arguments were either ignored, deformed, or taken out of context in German racial thought. The publication of the Essai was “virtually unnoticed in contemporary Germany” and the Gobineau Society met with limited success in its effort to propagate Gobineau's ideas.Footnote 89 In contrast to Chamberlain's optimism concerning the future of the German race, Gobineau painted a sober picture of unrelenting degradation, with no thought of improving society or hope for the future. He did not assert that ancient Germans were pure Aryans, he did not identify the Aryans with modern Germans, and he did not locate the Aryan race within modern Germany. Like the French nobility, Gobineau's Aryans were overwhelmed by the inertia of the inferior races they had tried in vain to civilize, losing their purity, their physical beauty, their energy, and finally becoming no better than the degenerate masses they had been compelled by their conquering nature to improve.Footnote 90 No wonder, then, that the museum dedicated to Gobineau's memory established by his longtime mistress, Madame de la Tour, in the château de Chaméane (Auvergne) should have been blown up by Nazis in July 1944.
