Arthur de Gobineau

Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (* July 14, 1816 in Ville d'Avray, near Paris, † October 13, 1882 in Turin ) was a French diplomat and writer, best known for his postulates a superior "Aryan" race of men and the harm of miscegenation been.

Life and work

After School Education and Study in France and in Switzerland Gobineau occurred in 1849 in the French Diplomatic Corps. In 1855 he was of Napoleon III. with an embassy to Persia (Iran) sent. 1859 was Count Gobineau as the Imperial Commissioner in the U.S., in 1861, he fulfilled as Envoy Extraordinary another mission in Persia, and in 1864 he came to Athens in the same capacity. Also in Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm Gobineau was in the diplomatic mission.

The main basis of the considerations Gobineau was the Biblical chronology of about 6,000 years of human history, which he associated with anthropological and physiological views of his time. He went from a perfect, God-made " original race ", namely the "Nordic", "Aryan " or " Germanic race " from which he beiordnete two more, resulting later primary races ( the "yellow " and "black" ). Hierarchical he held the white race of the yellow and the yellow race of black for prefixed. Mixtures between races he thought was widespread; they came always to the disadvantage of the higher race. Overall, mankind would therefore reduced by miscegenation in their quality. At the purest white to the original race was held there in Scandinavia and particularly in the French nobility, while the modern Germans to Gobineau's opinion merely represented a low-grade mixture of Celts and Slavs.

Gobineau's basic ideas found in Germany but often the appeal. Gobineau admired Richard Wagner and met several times with this. Wagner read Gobineau including 4 -volume Essay on the Inequality of Human Races ( Essai sur l' des races humaines inégalité, 1853-1855 ), in which the superiority of Gobineau tried to found the "Aryan race ". Wagner replied with " heroism and Christianity ," in which he criticized the racist ideas of Gobineau and partly rejected. The work was translated by Karl Ludwig Schemann, a member of the Bayreuth circle around Richard and Cosima Wagner, the German and took strong influence on the Wagner- son- Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau's basic idea, however, added a reinforced anti-Semitism (and not the French nobility but rather the German people for particularly "Aryan " held ).

Gobineau expressed in his essay doubts about the common descent of all human beings and seeks rather to develop arguments that the three breeds were created as distinct species. As a devout Catholic, who regarded the Bible as a historically accurate source for the history of mankind, he took Adam as the forefather of the " white race ", since the Bible undoubtedly speak of Adam as the ancestor of the white race, but doubted the then widespread interpretation of the biblical Ham as the forefather of the black race, since there is no evidence that colored races were regarded as part of human nature in the original biblical genealogy.

Whether he thought of Friedrich Nietzsche influenced this work is disputed. Later, the Nazis legitimated among others with this work their racial ideology, but of course not as Gobineau, the French nobility, but instead the Germans were regarded as particularly high quality. One finds Gobineau's ideas easily in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf again; how much Hitler was influenced by it, and what he did with it, the author Joachim C. Fest has summarized in his biography Hitler in the chapter The vision in the section The doctrine of the creative race nuclei. Fixed writes there, Gobineau had " for the first time the fear of racial chaos of modern times formulated and linked to the downfall of all cultures with the promiscuity of blood".

In his literary works, such as Les Pleiades or La Renaissance de Gobineau was just as successful. Again he themed his aristocratic views and his dislike of the democratic culture.

Aftermath and related successor

His race- theoretical works, particularly the assertion of the alleged negative effects of racial mixture, had in Germany. Significant impact on the Nationalist movement and Nazism

Henry Hotze, a U.S. citizen and a strong supporter of slavery, during the American Civil War, worked in London as one of the main agents and propagandists of the southern states in Europe later has Gobineau's Essai sur l' des races humaines inégalité and Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races early translated into English. These translations were used by proponents of slavery not only because of the fact alleged intellectual and moral inequality of the various races of man to legitimize slavery, but especially because of the formulated there doubts about the common ancestry of blacks and whites. Like Gobineau preached in the U.S. Madison Grant with his writing " The Passing of the Great Race" the superiority of the Nordic race, which he saw threatened by mixing.

In France Gobineau were recorded ( scientifically untenable ) views through the exiles Moses Hess and by Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the theory Gobineau awarded a cult liable habit. The Gobineau translator Karl Ludwig Schemann, the publicist of a racist anthropological Revue Ludwig Woltmann, the part-time anthropologist Otto Ammon, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain were in Germany with representatives of similar theories, but, as mentioned, the with an increasing focus on anti-Semitism and equating non-Jewish Germans with a " Germanic master race ".

Works

• Ternove, Roman. Méline, Carns et Cie. , Brussels 1848
• Essai sur l' des races humaines inégalité (1853-1855) German: Essay on the Inequality of the Human races, Fromann, Stuttgart 1898 ff