# data[].attributes.headline
Music and expression: as with art, music acts as a powerful tool to communicate emotions and messages

# data[].attributes.subject
Music and expression: as with art, music acts as a powerful tool to communicate emotions and messages

# data[].attributes.body
Along with artwork such as that of David Koloane, music has also been used as a powerful medium to capture people’s experiences of and feelings of racism and inequality.

Listen to this song by Lauryn Hill and make notes about what she is singing. Discuss what her lyrics are communicating with a partner:

# data[].attributes.headline
The Slave Ship: explore this painting by William Turner of a slave ship thought to be The Zong

# data[].attributes.subject
The Slave Ship: explore this painting by William Turner of a slave ship thought to be The Zong

# data[].attributes.body
Turner depicts a ship visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake.  The initial exhibition of the painting in 1840 coincided with international abolitionist campaigns and is thought to have been inspired by case of the Zong.

The Slave Ship, by Turner

# data[].attributes.headline
The Zong: a event which proved pivotal in the abolition of slavery

# data[].attributes.subject
The Zong: a event which proved pivotal in the abolition of slavery

# data[].attributes.body
In 1781, the captain of a slave ship inbound to Jamaica, the Zong, had ordered 132 slaves to be thrown overboard when drinking water was running low so that insurance payments could be collected; slaves who died of natural causes were not covered by insurance. This incident went to court, and the trial that ensued gained wide public attention, building support for the abolition of slavery. Although the trial was deemed to be inconclusive, it was a pivotal catalyst in the movement towards British abolition and a moment that later inspired Turner to portray the incident in The Slave Ship.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Slave Ship, originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhoon coming on, is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. Measuring 35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in. in oil on canvas, it is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake.

J.M.W. Turner was inspired to paint The Slave Ship in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire since 1833, Turner and many other abolitionists believed that slavery should be outlawed around the world. Turner thus exhibited his painting during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts.[citation needed ] Placed next to the painting were lines from Turner's own untitled poem, written in 1812:

"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds

Declare the Typhon's coming.

Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard

The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains

Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!

Where is thy market now?"

The first impression that the painting creates is of an enormous deep-red sunset over a stormy sea, an indication of an approaching typhoon. Upon closer inspection one can discern a ship sailing off into the distance. The masts of the ship are red, matching the blood-red colour of the sky and the sickly copper colour of the water, which serves to blur the lines between various objects in the painting. The ship's sails are furled, revealing that it is preparing for the typhoon. In the foreground can be seen a number of bodies floating in the water; their dark skin and chained hands and feet indicate that they are slaves, thrown overboard from the ship. Looking even more carefully, one can see fish and sea monsters swimming in the water, possibly preparing to eat the slaves, and sea gulls circling overhead above the chaos.

Consistent with Turner's emphasis on colour in many of his other works, the painting's central focus is on the interactions of various colours. Few defined brush strokes appear in the painting, and objects, colours, and figures become indistinct. Rather, objects are defined by their colours in the painting, and some objects (like the bodies of the slaves and the incoming storm) have no real border at all, being solely defined by the contrast with the pigments around them. The most prominent colours are the red of the sunset which encroaches into the water and ship as well, and the maroon of the bodies and hands of the slaves.

Turner's emphasis on colour rather than design is typical of many Romantic works of the time. The indistinct shapes and the pervasiveness of the sunset's blood-red colour serve to convey a focus on nature and illustrate the idea that nature is superior to man. Other colours in the painting, such as the cool blue of the ocean and the black caps of the water, bring the ocean's hues to life and give the viewer a sense of the true emotions of the natural world. The fact that the figures in the painting are depicted as minuscule and that even the ship is shunted to the background in favour of the water and the sun further serve to decrease the emphasis on humanity and transfer it to nature.

By placing the emphasis on nature rather than on figures or objects, Turner evokes the concept of the "sublime", coined by Edmund Burke. The idea of the sublime is of the utter powerlessness and terror of humanity in the face of nature; by dramatising the strength of the waves and sun, Turner uses The Slave Ship to encapsulate, perfectly, Burke's definition of the term. Turner's decision to paint the work with a series of quick, frenzied brush strokes rather than carefully defined lines adds to the intensity of the painting, serving to make the viewer feel even more overwhelmed. Though the painting's size is relatively small compared to many Romantic landscape paintings, it still captivates the viewer in arguably a more powerful way.

Some viewers have argued that The Slave Ship actually represents Turner's reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The painting might be viewed as an allegory against the exploitation of slaves and other human labour in favour of machines and economic advancement, represented by the coming storm engulfing the cruel captain. However, the storm could also be viewed as a representation of nature's dominance over man and of the ultimate futility in trying to industrialise and advance society.

"

What a red rag is to a bull, Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him-and me, now-to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him-and me, now-to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud-I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility-that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it. A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would say, now.

"

The art critic John Ruskin, who was the first owner of The Slave Ship, wrote, "If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this."

The painting was the subject of an extended poetic sequence or verse novel by David Dabydeen, Turner (1994; reissued 2002).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Slave Ship , originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhoon coming on , is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. Measuring 35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in. in oil on canvas, it is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Middle Passage: a term used for the transportation route of African slaves

# data[].attributes.subject
The Middle Passage: a term used for the transportation route of African slaves

# data[].attributes.body
The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African the markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the enslaved Africans were then sold or traded for raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the voyage. One key event in this period which was critical in bringing about the abolition of slavery was ‘the Zong’ which it is believed also inspired artist Turner to paint ‘The Slave Ship’.

Watch this short clip about the Middle Passage to find out more:

# data[].attributes.headline
David Koloane: an important artist who worked to capture the apartheid years

# data[].attributes.subject
David Koloane: an important artist who worked to capture the apartheid years

# data[].attributes.body
David Nthubu Koloane (5 June 1938 – 30 June 2019) was a South African artist. In his drawings, paintings and collages he explored questions about political injustice and human rights. Koloane is considered to have been "an influential artist and writer of the apartheid years" in South Africa.

The Night has a Thousand Eyes, by David Koloane

# data[].attributes.headline
Nelson Mandela: a global figure who promoted equality and peace in South Africa

# data[].attributes.subject
Nelson Mandela: a global figure who promoted equality and peace in South Africa

# data[].attributes.body
Mr Mandela was South Africa’s first democratically elected President. On 9 May 1994, soon after the landmark election results were in, he was unanimously elected President by South Africa’s new Members of Parliament. His legacy is continued by the Nelson Mandela Foundation which states ‘Our vision is a just society, one which learns from its pasts and listens to all its voices.’ His life involved such struggle and triumph that it is unsurprising it has been adapted into a film.

Watch the trailer here:

# data[].attributes.headline
South African apartheid: what was this period and what came out of it

# data[].attributes.subject
South African apartheid: what was this period and what came out of it

# data[].attributes.body
Apartheid (“apartness” in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa. Nelson Mandela was a leading figure in the ending of apartheid, and to express the injustices of the times artists such as David Koloane produced powerful works of art. In 1996 the Truth and Reconciliation Commision (TRC) was established to ‘help deal with what happened under apartheid’.

Watch this video to learn more about apartheid:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Apartheid in South Africa

Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act, passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing Black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC).

Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.

The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan "apartheid" (literally "apartness"). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa's white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide Black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.

Apartheid Becomes Law

By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between Black and white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (Black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white.

A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; a parent could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored.

A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country's land for the white minority, and "pass laws" required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.

In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government.

Apartheid and Separate Development

Hendrik Verwoerd, who became prime minister in 1958, refined apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as "separate development." The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating Black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no Black majority and reduced the possibility that Black people would unify into one nationalist organization.

Every Black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation's political body.

In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed Black South Africans from rural areas designated as "white" to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness.

Opposition to Apartheid

Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance.

Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black or white." The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason.

Sharpeville Massacre

In 1960, at the Black township of Sharpeville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 people were killed and more than 180 wounded.

The Sharpeville massacre convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state.

Nelson Mandela

By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause.

On June 10, 1980, his followers smuggled a letter from Mandela in prison and made it public: "UNITE! MOBILIZE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!"

President F.W. de Klerk

In 1976, when thousands of Black children in Soweto, a Black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for Black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets.

The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered any remaining illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation.

The United Nations General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973, and in 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. In 1985, the United Kingdom and United States imposed economic sanctions on the country.

Under pressure from the international community, the National Party government of Pieter Botha sought to institute some reforms, including abolition of the pass laws and the ban on interracial sex and marriage. The reforms fell short of any substantive change, however, and by 1989 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of another conservative president, F.W. de Klerk, who had supported apartheid throughout his political career.

When Did Apartheid End?

Though a conservative, De Klerk underwent a conversion to a more pragmatic political philosophy, and his government subsequently repealed the Population Registration Act, as well as most of the other legislation that formed the legal basis for apartheid. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990.

A new constitution, which enfranchised Black citizens and other racial groups, took effect in 1994, and elections that year led to a coalition government with a nonwhite majority, marking the official end of the apartheid system.

Sources

The End of Apartheid. Archive: U.S. Department of State.
A History of Apartheid in South Africa. South African History Online.
South Africa: Twenty-Five Years Since Apartheid. The Ohio State University: Stanton Foundation.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Apartheid: Definition & South Africa | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Apartheid, the legal and cultural segregation of the non-white citizens of South Africa, ended in 1994 thanks to activist Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk.

# data[].attributes.headline
Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902): a controversial figure has been associated with racism and the apartheid

# data[].attributes.subject
Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902): a controversial figure has been associated with racism and the apartheid

# data[].attributes.body
Rhodes believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was, to quote a letter of 1877, 'the first race in the world'. Under the reasoning that 'the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race', he advocated vigorous settler colonialism and ultimately a reformation of the British Empire so that each component would be self-governing and represented in a single parliament in London. In recent times, the protest movement ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ has called for his statues to be taken down with references made to apartheid in South Africa.

Cecil Rhodes

# data[].attributes.headline
Colonialism: a process which has underpinned other economic and social situations globally

# data[].attributes.subject
Colonialism: a process which has underpinned other economic and social situations globally

# data[].attributes.body
Colonialism can be defined as ‘the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.’ Conquering nations cast their role as civilizing “barbaric” or “savage” nations, and argued that they were acting in the best interests of those whose lands and peoples they exploited. A key figure in this period of colonisation is Cecil Rhodes.

What is colonialism?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Colonialism is defined as "control by one power over a dependent area or people." It occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people. By 1914, a large majority of the world's nations had been colonized by Europeans at some point.

Japan, Korea, and Thailand are the only other nations never to have been colonized by Europeans.

The concept of colonialism is closely linked to that of imperialism, which is the policy or ethos of using power and influence to control another nation or people, that underlies colonialism.

History of colonialism

In antiquity, colonialism was practiced by empires such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and Phoenicia. These civilizations all extended their borders into surrounding and non-contiguous areas from about 1550 B.C. onward, and established colonies that used the physical and population resources of the people they conquered to increase their own power.

In Ancient Greece, for example, city-states often established colonies in search of both extra living space and economic gain. After consulting an oracle, members of the city-state would send a select group of its inhabitants to establish a new colony. To seal the association between colony and city, its founding members would light a fire with a flame taken from the original city's central hearth and engage in other rituals laying claim to the new location.

During what is now known as the Age of Discovery, founding a new colony depended on another ritual: gaining the sponsorship of a wealthy patron, usually a monarch, and embarking on large ships to search for unceded land. Beginning in the 15th century, Portugal began looking for new trade routes and searching for civilizations outside of Europe. In 1415, Portuguese explorers conquered Ceuta, a coastal town in North Africa, kicking off an empire that would last until 1999.

Soon the Portuguese had conquered and populated islands like Madeira and Cape Verde, and their rival nation, Spain, decided to try exploration, too. In 1492, Christopher Columbus began looking for a western route to India and China. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas, kicking off the Spanish Empire. Spain and Portugal soon became locked in competition for new territories and took over Indigenous lands in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia.

The rest of Western Europe swiftly followed: England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany quickly began their own empire building overseas, fighting Spain and Portugal for the right to lands they had already colonized.

Often, the colonies were wrested from the hands of their Indigenous inhabitants by relatively small parties of European men who lay claim after short skirmishes or by intimidating locals with their vessels, weapons, and trade items. For example, Columbus' crew for his famous 1492 voyage consisted of just 90 men, 39 of whom he left behind to build a settlement in what is now Haiti.

Subjugation and revolutions

Among the allures of colonialism was the chance to recruit-and often enslave-Indigenous people to benefit a colonial power. In Brazil, for example, explorers called bandeirantesembarked on expeditions in search of Native people to capture and enslave for Portuguese-established plantations and mines. And slavers from throughout Europe participated in the Atlantic slave trade, dealing in kidnapped Central and West Africans and forcing them to perform labor that enriched their empires overseas.

Even former colonies eventually became colonizers themselves: The U.S., which was formerly held by Great Britain, extended its territory shortly after winning the War of Independence and later expanded its claims to the Pacific and Latin America.

Starting in the 1880s, European nations also began taking over African nations, racing to coveted natural resources and establishing colonies they would hold until an international period of decolonization that lasted from around 1914 to 1975 and challenged European rule

By far, the most successful colonizer was the British Empire, which at its height soon after World War I could boast territories in every time zone in the world. The sun "never set" on England's political and economic ambitions, which it carried out with the help of British colonial governments.

De Beers Diamond magnate and British imperialist Cecil Rhodes is a controversial figure in South Africa. In recent years, many of the country's residents have called for the removal of monuments honoring Rhodes, saying his influence paved the way for apartheid.

Photograph by Hulton-Deutsch Collection, CORBIS/Corbis via Getty

Despite the growth of European colonies in the Western Hemisphere, most colonized countries gained independence during the 18th and 19th century, beginning with the American Revolution in 1776 and the Haitian Revolution in 1781. However, the Eastern Hemisphere continued to tempt European colonial powers.

Colonial rationale and resistance

Colonial powers justified their conquests by claiming they had a legal and religious obligation to control the land and culture of Indigenous peoples. Conquering nations cast their role as civilizing "barbaric" or "savage" nations, and argued that they were acting in the best interests of those whose lands and peoples they exploited.

Historically, church leaders both encouraged and participated in the takeover and exploitation of foreign lands and labor, most often in the name of Christian conversion. In the 15 th century, Catholic popes laid out a religious justification for colonization, issuing a series of papal bulls now known as the Doctrine of Discovery that asserted colonization was necessary to save souls and seize lands for the growth of the Church. Often, Christian missionaries were among the first to make inroads into new lands. Inspired by the belief that they must convert as many Indigenous people to Christianity as possible, they imported both religious and cultural customs and a paternalistic attitude toward the colonies' Native inhabitants.

Mahatma Gandhi enjoys a laugh with his two granddaughters Ava and Manu. Gandhi oversaw the end of Great Britain's colonial rule in India.

Photograph by Bettmann, Getty

Yet resistance to this control is an integral part of the story of colonialism. Even before decolonization, Indigenous people on all continents staged violent and nonviolent resistance to their conquerors. These included the Pueblo Rebellion overthrowing Spanish rule of what is now New Mexico in 1680, the slave revolt turned revolution in Haiti in 1791, a series of rebellions against English rule in India, and many other instances of collective and personal resistance.

Ethiopia was able to remain one of just two African nations to sidestep European colonial rule due to a series of savvy alliances forged by its emperor, and in 1896 the nation managed to stave off an Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa.

Colonialism's legacy

Colonial governments invested in infrastructure and trade and disseminated medical and technological knowledge. In some cases, they encouraged literacy, the adoption of Western human rights standards, and sowed the seeds for democratic institutions and systems of government. Some former colonies, like Ghana, experienced a rise in nutrition and health with colonial rule, and colonial European settlement has been linked to some development gains.

However, coercion and forced assimilation often accompanied those gains, and scholars still debate colonialism's many legacies. Colonialism's impacts include environmental degradation, the spread of disease, economic instability, ethnic rivalries, and human rights violations -issues that can long outlast one group's colonial rule.

As South Asia historian John McQuade writes, "It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The subjugation of indigenous people-and the exploitation of their land and resources-has a long and brutal history.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Holocaust: a horrific period of the second world war of racial persecution at its worst

# data[].attributes.subject
The Holocaust: a horrific period of the second world war of racial persecution at its worst

# data[].attributes.body
One of the most atrocious examples of racial hatred in the history of mankind is the Holocaust. When the Nazis came to power, Anti-Semitism was so strong that it spread around the world. Listen to these accounts of experiences of the Holocaust. Make notes about what you hear and discuss the stories with a partner.

https://youtu.be/uZc_UrTpw1s

https://youtu.be/6ATBHMDX_ls
https://youtu.be/6OT8waWCU0k

# data[].attributes.headline
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882): a key player in the development of the theory of the Aryan master race

# data[].attributes.subject
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882): a key player in the development of the theory of the Aryan master race

# data[].attributes.body
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific racist theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race. Inspiring a social movement in Germany named Gobinism, his works were also influential on prominent antisemites like Richard Wagner, and leaders of the Nazi Party. His Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 4 vol. (1853–55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), that was by far his most influential work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau ( French: ; 14 July 1816 - 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific race theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race. Known to his contemporaries as a novelist, diplomat and travel writer, 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 aristocrats were superior to commoners, and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races.

Gobineau's writings 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.

Gobineau came from an old well-established aristocratic family. His father, Louis de Gobineau (1784-1858), was a military officer and staunch royalist. His mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a non-noble royal tax official. The de Gercy family lived in the French Crown colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) for a time in the 18th century. Gobineau always feared he might have black ancestors on his mother's side.

Reflecting his hatred of the French Revolution, Gobineau later wrote: "My birthday is July 14th, the date on which the Bastille was captured-which goes to prove how opposites may come together". As a boy and young man, Gobineau loved the Middle Ages, which he saw as a golden age of chivalry and knighthood much preferable to his own time. Someone who knew Gobineau as a teenager described him as a romantic, "with chivalrous ideas and a heroic spirit, dreaming of what was most noble and most grand".

Gobineau's father was committed to restoring the House of Bourbon and helped the royalist Polignac brothers to escape from France. As punishment he was imprisoned by Napoleon's secret police but was freed when the Allies took Paris in 1814. During the Hundred Days the de Gobineau family fled France. After Napoleon's final overthrow following the Battle of Waterloo, Louis de Gobineau was rewarded for his loyalty to the House of Bourbon by being made a captain in the Royal Guard of King Louis XVIII. The pay for a Royal Guardsman was very low, and the de Gobineau family struggled on his salary.

Magdeleine de Gobineau abandoned her husband for her children's tutor Charles de La Coindière. Together with her lover she took her son and two daughters on extended wanderings across eastern France, Switzerland and the Grand Duchy of Baden. To support herself, she turned to fraud (for which she was imprisoned). His mother became a severe embarrassment to Gobineau, who never spoke to her after he turned twenty.

For the young de Gobineau, committed to upholding traditional aristocratic and Catholic values, the disintegration of his parents' marriage, his mother's open relationship with her lover, her fraudulent acts, and the turmoil imposed by being constantly on the run and living in poverty were all very traumatic.

Gobineau spent the early part of his teenage years in the town of Inzligen where his mother and her lover were staying. He became fluent in German. As a staunch supporter of the House of Bourbon, his father was forced to retire from the Royal Guard after the July Revolution of 1830 brought House of Orléans King Louis-Philippe, Le roi citoyen, ("the Citizen King") to power. He promised to reconcile the heritage of the French Revolution with the monarchy. Given his family's history of supporting the Bourbons, the young Gobineau regarded the July Revolution as a disaster for France. His views were those of a Legitimist committed to a Catholic France ruled over by the House of Bourbon. In 1831, de Gobineau's father took custody of his three children, and his son spent the rest of his adolescence in Lorient, in Brittany.

The Orientalist tales of Antoine Galland (pictured) had a strong influence on Gobineau in his youth.

Gobineau disliked his father, whom he dismissed as a boring and pedantic army officer incapable of stimulating thought. Lorient had been founded in 1675 as a base for the French East India Company as King Louis XIV had grand ambitions for making France the dominant political and economic power in Asia. As those ambitions were unrealized, Gobineau developed a sense of faded glory as he grew up in a city that had been built to be the dominant hub for Europe's trade with Asia. This dream went unrealized, as India became part of the British and not the French empire.

As a young man, Gobineau was fascinated with the Orient, as the Middle East was known in Europe in the 19th century. While studying at the Collège de Bironne in Switzerland, a fellow student recalled: "All of his aspirations were towards the East. He dreamt only of mosques and minarets; he called himself a Muslim, ready to make the pilgrimage to Mecca". Gobineau loved Oriental tales by the French translator Antoine Galland, often saying he wanted to become an Orientalist. He read Arab, Turkish and Persian tales in translation, becoming what the French call a " un orientaliste de pacotille" ("rubbish orientalist"). In 1835, Gobineau failed the entrance exams to the St. Cyr military school.

In September 1835, Gobineau left for Paris with fifty francs in his pocket aiming to become a writer. He moved in with an uncle, Thibaut-Joseph de Gobineau, a Legitimist with an "unlimited" hatred of Louis-Philippe. Reflecting his tendency towards elitism, Gobineau founded a society of Legitimist intellectuals called Les Scelti ("the elect"), which included himself, the painter Guermann John (German von Bohn) and the writer Maxime du Camp.

In the later years of the July Monarchy, Gobineau made his living writing serialized fiction (romans-feuilletons) and contributing to reactionary periodicals. He wrote for the Union Catholique, La Quotidienne, L'Unité, and Revue de Paris. At one point in the early 1840s, Gobineau was writing an article every day for La Quotidienne to support himself. As a writer and journalist, he struggled financially and was forever looking for a wealthy patron willing to support him. As a part-time employee of the Post Office and a full-time writer, Gobineau was desperately poor.

His family background made him a supporter of the House of Bourbon, but the nature of the Legitimist movement dominated by factious and inept leaders drove Gobineau to despair, leading him to write: "We are lost and had better resign ourselves to the fact". In a letter to his father, Gobineau complained of "the laxity, the weakness, the foolishness and-in a word-the pure folly of my cherished party".

At the same time, he regarded French society under the House of Orléans as corrupt and self-serving, dominated by the "oppressive feudalism of money" as opposed to the feudalism of "charity, courage, virtue and intelligence" held by the ancien-régime nobility. Gobineau wrote about July Monarchy France: "Money has become the principle of power and honour. Money dominates business; money regulates the population; money governs; money salves consciences; money is the criterion for judging the esteem due to men".

In this "age of national mediocrity" as Gobineau described it, with society going in a direction he disapproved of, the leaders of the cause to which he was committed being by his own admission foolish and incompetent, and the would-be aristocrat struggling to make ends meet by writing hack journalism and novels, he became more and more pessimistic about the future. Gobineau wrote in a letter to his father: "How I despair of a society which is no longer anything, except in spirit, and which has no heart left". He complained the Legitimists spent their time feuding with one another while the Catholic Church "is going over to the side of the revolution". Gobineau wrote:

Our poor country lies in Roman decadence. Where there is no longer an aristocracy worthy of itself, a nation dies. Our Nobles are conceited fools and cowards. I no longer believe in anything nor have any views. From Louis-Philippe we shall proceed to the first trimmer who will take us up, but only in order to pass us on to another. For we are without fibre and moral energy. Money has killed everything.

Gobineau struck up a friendship and had voluminous correspondence with Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville praised Gobineau in a letter: "You have wide knowledge, much intelligence, and the best of manners". He later gave Gobineau an appointment in the Quai d'Orsay (the French foreign ministry) while serving as foreign minister during the Second Republic of France.

Breakthrough with Kapodistrias article

In 1841, Gobineau scored his first major success when an article he submitted to Revue des deux Mondes was published on 15 April 1841. Gobineau's article was about the Greek statesman Count Ioannis Kapodistrias. At the time, La Revue des Deux Mondes was one of the most prestigious journals in Paris, and being published in it put Gobineau in the same company as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Philarète Chasles, Alphonse de Lamartine, Edgar Quinet and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve who were all published regularly in that journal.

Gobineau's writings on international politics were generally as negative as his writings on France. He depicted Britain as a nation motivated entirely by hatred and greed and the extent of the British Empire around the globe as a source of regret. Gobineau often attacked King Louis-Phillipe for his pro-British foreign policy, writing that he had "humiliated" France by allowing the British Empire to become the world's dominant power. However, reports on the poor economic state of Ireland were a source of satisfaction for Gobineau as he asserted: "It is Ireland which is pushing England into the abyss of revolution".

According to Gobineau, the growing power and aggressiveness of Imperial Russia were a cause for concern. He regarded the disastrous retreat from Kabul by the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War with Afghanistan as a sign Russia would be the dominant power in Asia, writing: "England, an aging nation, is defending its livelihood and its existence. Russia, a youthful nation, is following its path towards the power that it must surely gain ... The empire of the Tsars is today the power which seems to have the greatest future ... The Russian people are marching steadfastly towards a goal that is indeed known but still not completely defined". Gobineau regarded Russia as an Asian power and felt the inevitable triumph of Russia was a triumph of Asia over Europe.

He had mixed feelings about the German states, praising Prussia as a conservative society dominated by the . But he worried increasing economic growth promoted by the Zollverein (the German Customs Union) was making the Prussian middle-class more powerful. Gobineau was critical of the Austrian Empire, writing that the House of Habsburg ruled over a mixed population of ethnic Germans, Magyars, Italians, Slavic peoples, etc., and it was inevitable such a multi-ethnic society would go into decline, while the "purely German" Prussia was destined to unify Germany.

Gobineau was also pessimistic about Italy, writing: "Shortly after the condottieri disappeared everything that had lived and flourished with them went too; wealth, gallantry, art and liberty, there remained nothing but a fertile land and an incomparable sky". Gobineau denounced Spain for rejecting "a firm and natural authority, a power rooted in national liberty", predicting that without order imposed by an absolute monarchy, she was destined to sink into a state of perpetual revolution. He was dismissive of Latin America, writing with references to the wars of independence: "The destruction of their agriculture, trade and finances, the inevitable consequence of long civil disorder, did not at all seem to them a price too high to pay for what they had in view. And yet who would want to claim that the half-barbarous inhabitants of Castile or the Algarve or the on the River Plate really deserve to sit as supreme legislators, in the places which they have contested against their masters with such pleasure and energy".

About the United States, Gobineau wrote: "The only greatness is that of wealth, and as everyone can acquire this, its ownership is independent of any of the qualities reserved to superior natures". Gobineau wrote the United States lacked an aristocracy, with no sense of noblesse oblige ("nobility obligates") as existed in Europe. The American poor suffered worse than the European poor, causing the United States to be a violent society, where greed and materialism were the only values that counted. In general Gobineau was hostile towards people in the Americas, writing that who in the Old World does not know "that the New World knows nothing of kings, princes and nobles?-that on those semi-virgin lands, in human societies born yesterday and scarcely yet consolidated, no one has the right or the power to call himself any greater than the very least of its citizens?"

Portrait of Gobineau's wife, Clémence, by Ary Scheffer (1850)

In 1846, Gobineau married Clémence Gabrielle Monnerot. She had pressed for a hasty marriage as she was pregnant by their mutual friend Pierre de Serre who had abandoned her. As a practicing Catholic, she did not wish to give birth to an illegitimate child. Monnerot had been born in Martinique. As with his mother, Gobineau was never entirely certain if his wife, and hence his two daughters had black ancestors or not, as it was a common practice for French slave masters in the Caribbean to take a slave mistress. Gobineau's opposition to slavery, which he held always resulted in harmful miscegenation to whites, may have stemmed from his own personal anxieties that his mother or his wife might have African ancestry.

Gobineau's novels and poems of the 1830s-40s were usually set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance with aristocratic heroes who by their very existence uphold all of the values Gobineau felt were worth celebrating like honor and creativity against a corrupt, soulless middle class. His 1847 novel Ternove was the first time Gobineau linked class with race, writing "Monsieur de Marvejols would think of himself, and of all members of the nobility, as of a race apart, of a superior essence, and he believed it criminal to sully this by mixture with plebeian blood." The novel, set against the backdrop of the Hundred Days of 1815, concerns the disastrous results when an aristocrat Octave de Ternove unwisely marries the daughter of a miller.

Gobineau was horrified by the Revolution of 1848 and disgusted by what he saw as the supine reaction of the European upper classes to the revolutionary challenge. Writing in the spring of 1848 about the news from Germany he noted: "Things are going pretty badly ... I do not mean the dismissal of the princes-that was deserved. Their cowardice and lack of political faith make them scarcely interesting. But the peasants, there they are nearly barbarous. There is pillage, and burning, and massacre-and we are only at the beginning."

As a Legitimist, Gobineau disliked the House of Bonaparte and was displeased when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president of the republic in 1848. However, he came to support Bonaparte as the best man to preserve order, and in 1849, when Tocqueville became Foreign Minister, his friend Gobineau became his chef de cabinet.

Shocked by the Revolution of 1848, Gobineau first expressed his racial theories in his 1848 epic poem Manfredine. In it he revealed his fear of the revolution being the beginning of the end of aristocratic Europe, with common folk descended from lesser breeds taking over. Reflecting his disdain for ordinary people, Gobineau said French aristocrats like himself were the descendants of the Germanic Franks who conquered the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century AD, while common French people were the descendants of racially inferior Celtic and Mediterranean people. This was an old theory first promoted in a tract by Count Henri de Boulainvilliers. He had argued that the Second Estate (the aristocracy) was of "Frankish" blood and the Third Estate (the commoners) were of "Gaulish" blood. Born after the French Revolution had destroyed the idealized Ancien Régime of his imagination, Gobineau felt a deep sense of pessimism regarding the future.

For him the French Revolution, having destroyed the racial basis of French greatness by overthrowing and in many cases killing the aristocracy, was the beginning of a long, irresistible process of decline and degeneration, which could only end with the utter collapse of European civilization. He felt what the French Revolution had begun the Industrial Revolution was finishing; industrialization and urbanization were a complete disaster for Europe.

Like many other European romantic conservatives, Gobineau looked back nostalgically at an idealized version of the Middle Ages as an idyllic agrarian society living harmoniously in a rigid social order. He loathed modern Paris, a city he called a "giant cesspool" full of les déracinés ("the uprooted")-the criminal, impoverished, drifting men with no real home. Gobineau considered them to be the monstrous products of centuries of miscegenation ready to explode in revolutionary violence at any moment. He was an ardent opponent of democracy, which he stated was mere "mobocracy"-a system that allowed the utterly stupid mob the final say on running the state.

From November 1849 to January 1854 Gobineau was stationed at the French legation in Bern as the First Secretary. During his time in Switzerland Gobineau wrote the majority of the Essai.

He was stationed in Hanover in the fall of 1851 as acting Chargé d'Affaires, and was impressed by the "traces of real nobility" he said he saw at the Hanoverian court. Gobineau especially liked the blind King George V whom he saw as a "philosopher-king" and to whom he dedicated the Essai s. He praised the "remarkable character" of Hanoverian men and likewise commended Hanoverian society as having "an instinctive preference for hierarchy" with the commoners always deferring to the nobility, which he explained on racial grounds.

Reflecting his lifelong interest in the Orient, Gobineau joined the Société Asiatique in 1852 and got to know several French Orientalists, like Julius von Mohl, very well.

In January 1854, Gobineau was sent as First Secretary to the French legation at the Free City of Frankfurt. Of the Federal Convention of the German Confederation that sat in Frankfurt-also known as the "Confederation Diet"-Gobineau wrote: "The Diet is a business office for the German bureaucracy-it is very far from being a real political body". Gobineau hated the Prussian representative at the Diet, Prince Otto von Bismarck, because of his advances towards Madame Gobineau. By contrast, the Austrian representative, General Anton von Prokesch-Osten became one of Gobineau's best friends. He was a reactionary Austrian soldier and diplomat who hated democracy and saw himself as a historian and orientalist, and for all these reasons Gobineau bonded with him. It was during these periods that Gobineau began to write less often to his old liberal friend Tocqueville and more often to his new conservative friend Prokesch-Osten.

Gobineau's racial theories

In his own lifetime, Gobineau was known as a novelist, a poet and for his travel writing recounting his adventures in Iran and Brazil rather than for the racial theories for which he is now mostly remembered. However, he always regarded his book Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) as his masterpiece and wanted to be remembered as its author. A firm reactionary who believed in the innate superiority of aristocrats over commoners-whom he held in utter contempt-Gobineau embraced the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism to justify aristocratic rule over racially inferior commoners.

Racial magnum opus: An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races

Cover of the original edition of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races

In his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, Gobineau ultimately accepts the prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve ( monogenism as opposed to polygenism). He suggests, however, that "nothing proves that at the first redaction of the Adamite genealogies the colored races were considered as forming part of the species"; and, "We may conclude that the power of producing fertile offspring is among the marks of a distinct species. As nothing leads us to believe that the human race is outside this rule, there is no answer to this argument."

Gobineau stated he was writing about races, not individuals: examples of talented black or Asian individuals did not disprove his thesis of the supposed inferiority of the black and Asian races. He wrote:

"I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains, who declare some Wolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that a Kaffir dances and plays the violin, that some Bambara knows arithmetic ... Let us leave aside these puerilities and compare together not men, but groups."

Gobineau argued that race was destiny, declaring rhetorically:

So the brain of a Huron Indian contains in undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely that same as an Englishman or a Frenchman! Why then, in the course of the ages has he not then invented printing or steam power?

Gobineau's primary thesis was that European civilization flowed from Greece to Rome, and then to Germanic and contemporary civilization. He thought this corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, which earlier anthropologists had misconceived as " Aryan"-a term that only Indo-Iranians are known to have used in ancient times. This included groups classified by language like the Celts, Slavs and the Germans. Gobineau later came to use and reserve the term Aryan only for the "Germanic race", and described the Aryans as la race germanique. By doing so, he presented a racist theory in which Aryans-that is Germanic people-were all that was positive.

Reaction to Gobineau's essay

The Essai attracted mostly negative reviews from French critics, which Gobineau used as a proof of the supposed truth of his racial theories, writing "the French, who are always ready to set anything afire-materially speaking-and who respect nothing, either in religion or politics, have always been the world's greatest cowards in matters of science". However, events such as the expansion of European and American influence overseas and the unification of Germany led Gobineau to alter his opinion to believe the " white race" could be saved. The German-born American historian George Mosse argued that Gobineau projected his fear and hatred of the French middle and working classes onto Asian and Black people.

Summarizing Mosse's argument, Davies argued that: "The self-serving, materialistic oriental of the Essai was really an anti-capitalist's portrait of the money-grubbing French middle class" while "the sensual, unintelligent and violent negro" that Gobineau portrayed in the Essai was an aristocratic caricature of the French poor. In his writings on the French peasantry, Gobineau characteristically insisted in numerous anecdotes, which he said were based on personal experience, that French farmers were coarse, crude people incapable of learning, indeed of any sort of thinking beyond the most rudimentary level of thought. As the American critic Michelle Wright wrote, "the peasant may inhabit the land, but they are certainly not part of it". Wright further noted the very marked similarity between Gobineau's picture of the French peasantry and his view of blacks.

In 1855, Gobineau left Paris to become the first secretary at the French legation in Tehran, Persia (modern Iran). He was promoted to chargé d'affaires the following year. The histories of Persia and Greece had played prominent roles in the Essai and Gobineau wanted to see both places for himself. His mission was to keep Persia out of the Russian sphere of influence, but he cynically wrote: "If the Persians ... unite with the western powers, they will march against the Russians in the morning, be defeated by them at noon and become their allies by evening". Gobineau's time was not taxed by his diplomatic duties, and he spent time studying ancient cuneiform texts and learning Persian. He came to speak a "kitchen Persian" that allowed him to talk to Persians somewhat. (He was never fluent in Persian as he said he was.) Despite having some love for the Persians, Gobineau was shocked they lacked his racial prejudices and were willing to accept blacks as equals. He criticized Persian society for being too "democratic".

Gobineau saw Persia as a land without a future destined to be conquered by the West sooner or later. For him this was a tragedy for the West. He believed Western men would all too easily be seduced by the beautiful Persian women causing more miscegenation to further "corrupt" the West. However, he was obsessed with ancient Persia, seeing in Achaemenid Persia a great and glorious Aryan civilization, now sadly gone. This was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Gobineau loved to visit the ruins of the Achaemenid period as his mind was fundamentally backward looking, preferring to contemplate past glories rather than what he saw as a dismal present and even bleaker future.

His time in Persia inspired two books: Mémoire sur l'état social de la Perse actuelle (1858) ("Memoire on the Social State of Today's Persia") and Trois ans en Asie (1859) ("Three Years in Asia").

Gobineau was less than complimentary about modern Persia. He wrote to Prokesch-Osten that there was no "Persian race" as modern Persians were "a breed mixed from God knows what!". He loved ancient Persia as the great Aryan civilization par excellence, however, noting that Iran means "the land of the Aryans" in Persian. Gobineau was less Eurocentric than one might expect in his writings on Persia, believing the origins of European civilization could be traced to Persia. He criticized western scholars for their "collective vanity" in being unable to admit to the West's "huge" debt to Persia.

Josiah C. Nott

Henry Hotze

In 1856, two American "race scientists", Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, both ardent white supremacists, translated Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines into English. Champions of slavery, they found in Gobineau's anti-black writings a convenient justification for the "peculiar institution". Nott and Hotze found much to approve of in the Essai such as: "The Negro is the most humble and lags at the bottom of the scale. The animal character imprinted upon his brow marks his destiny from the moment of his conception". Much to Gobineau's intense annoyance, Nott and Hotze abridged the first volume of the Essai from 1,600 pages in the French original down to 400 in English. At least part of the reason for this was because of Gobineau's hostile picture of Americans. About American white people, Gobineau declared:

They are a very mixed assortment of the most degenerate races in olden-day Europe. They are the human flotsam of all ages: Irish, crossbreed Germans and French and Italians of even more doubtful stock. The intermixture of all these decadent ethnic varieties will inevitably give birth to further ethnic chaos. This chaos is no way unexpected or new: it will produce no further ethnic mixture which has not already been, or cannot be realized on our own continent. Absolutely nothing productive will result from it, and even when ethnic combinations resulting from infinite unions between Germans, Irish, Italians, French and Anglo-Saxons join us in the south with racial elements composed of Indian, Negro, Spanish and Portuguese essence, it is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusions, but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people.

Highly critical passages like this were removed from The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, as the Essai was titled in English. Nott and Hotze retained only the parts relating to the alleged inherent inferiority of blacks. Likewise, they used Gobineau as a way of attempting to establish that white America was in mortal peril despite the fact that most American blacks were slaves in 1856. The two "race scientists" argued on the basis of the Essai that blacks were essentially a type of vicious animal, rather than human beings, and would always pose a danger to whites. The passages of the Essai where Gobineau declared that, though of low intelligence, blacks had certain artistic talents and that a few "exceptional" African tribal chiefs probably had a higher IQ than those of the stupidest whites were not included in the American edition. Nott and Hotze wanted nothing that might give blacks admirable human qualities. Beyond that, they argued that nation and race were the same, and that to be American was to be white. As such, the American translators argued in their introduction that just as various European nations were torn apart by nationality conflicts caused by different "races" living together, likewise ending slavery and granting American citizenship to blacks would cause the same sort of conflicts, but only on a much vaster scale in the United States.

In 1859, an Anglo-French dispute over the French fishing rights on the French Shore of Newfoundland led to an Anglo-French commission being sent to Newfoundland to find a resolution to the dispute. Gobineau was one of the two French commissioners dispatched to Newfoundland, an experience that he later recorded in his 1861 book Voyage à Terre-Neuve ("Voyage to Newfoundland"). In 1858, the Foreign Minister Count Alexandre Colonna-Walewski had tried to send Gobineau to the French legation in Beijing. He objected that as a "civilized European" he had no wish to go to an Asian country like China. As punishment, Walewski sent Gobineau to Newfoundland, telling him he would be fired from the Quai d'Orsay if he refused the Newfoundland assignment.

Gobineau hated Newfoundland, writing to a friend in Paris on 26 July 1859: "This is an awful country. It is very cold, there is almost constant fog, and one sails between pieces of floating ice of enormous size." In his time in St. John's, a city largely inhabited by Irish immigrants, Gobineau deployed virtually every anti-Irish cliché in his reports to Paris. He stated the Irish of St. John's were extremely poor, undisciplined, conniving, obstreperous, dishonest, loud, violent, and usually drunk. He described several of the remote fishing settlements he visited in Utopian terms, praising them as examples of how a few hardy, tough people could make a living under very inhospitable conditions. Gobineau's praise for Newfoundland fishermen reflected his viewpoint that those who cut themselves off from society best preserve their racial purity. Despite his normal contempt for ordinary people, he called the Newfoundland fishermen he met "the best men that I have ever seen in the world". Gobineau observed that in these remote coastal settlements, there were no policemen as there was no crime, going on to write:

I am not sorry to have seen once in my life a sort of Utopia. [...] A savage and hateful climate, a forbidding countryside, the choice between poverty and hard dangerous labour, no amusements, no pleasures, no money, fortune and ambition being equally impossible-and still, for all this, a cheerful outlook, a kind of domestic well-being of the most primitive kind. [...] But this is what succeeds in enabling men to make use of complete liberty and to be tolerant of one another.

In 1861, Gobineau returned to Tehran as the French minister and lived a modest, ascetic lifestyle. He became obsessed with ancient Persia. This soon got out of control as he sought to prove ancient Persia was founded by his much admired Aryans, leading him to engage in what Irwin called "deranged" theories about Persia's history. In 1865 Gobineau published Les religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie centrale ("Religions and Philosophies in Central Asia"), an account of his travels in Persia and encounters with the various esoteric Islamic sects he discovered being practiced in the Persian countryside. His mystical frame of mind led him to feel in Persia what he called " un certain plaisir" ("a certain pleasure") as nowhere else in the world did he feel the same sort of joy he felt when viewing the ruins of Persia.

Gobineau had a low opinion of Islam, a religion invented by the Arab Mohammed. He viewed him as part of the "Semitic race", unlike the Persians whose Indo-European language led him to see them as Aryans. Gobineau believed that Shia Islam was part of a "revolt" by the Aryan Persians against the Semitic Arabs, seeing a close connection between Shia Islam and Persian nationalism. His understanding of Persia was distorted and confused. He mistakenly believed Shi'ism was practiced only in Persia, and that in Shi'ism the Imam Ali is much more venerated than Muhammad. He was unaware that Shia Islam only became the state religion of Persia under the Safavids. Based on his own experiences, Gobineau believed the Persians did not really believe in Islam, with the faith of the Prophet being a cover over a society that still preserved many pre-Islamic features. Gobineau also described the savage persecution of the followers of Bábism and of the new religion of the Baháʼí Faith by the Persian state, which was determined to uphold Shia Islam as the state religion. Gobineau approved of the persecution of the Babi. He wrote they were "veritable communists" and "true and pure supporters of socialism", as every bit as dangerous as the French socialists. He agreed the Peacock Throne was right to stamp out Bábism. Gobineau was one of the first Westerners to examine the esoteric sects of Persia. Though his work was idiosyncratic, he did spark scholarly interest in an aspect of Persia that had been ignored by Westerners until then. His command of Persian was average, his Arabic was worse. Since there were few Western Orientalists who knew Persian, however, Gobineau was able to pass himself off for decades as a leading Orientalist who knew Persia like no one else.

Criticism of Gobineau's Persian work

Only with his studies in ancient Persia did Gobineau come under fire from scholars. He published two books on ancient Persia, Lectures des textes cunéiformes (1858) ("Readings of Cuneiform Texts") and Traité des écritures cunéiformes (1864) ("Treatise of Cuneiform Fragments"). Irwin wrote: "The first treatise is wrong-headed, yet still on this side of sanity; the second later and much longer work shows many signs of the kind of derangement that is likely to infect those who interest themselves too closely in the study of occultism." One of the principal problems with Gobineau's approach to translating the cuneiform texts of ancient Persia was that he failed to understand linguistic change and that Old Persian was not the same language as modern Persian. His books met with hostile reception from scholars who argued that Gobineau simply did not understand the texts he was purporting to translate.

Gobineau's article attempting to rebut his critics in the Journal asiatique was not published, as the editors had to politely tell him his article was "unpublishable" as it was full of "absurd" claims and vitriolic abuse of his critics. During his second time in Persia, Gobineau spent much time working as an amateur archeologist and gathering material for what was to become Traité des écritures cunéiformes, a book that Irwin called "a monument to learned madness". Gobineau was always very proud of it, seeing the book as a magnum opus that rivaled the Essai. Gobineau had often traveled from Tehran to the Ottoman Empire to visit the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin at Khorsabad, near Mosul in what is now northern Iraq. The ruins of Khorsabad are Assyrian, built by King Sargon II in 717 BC, but Gobineau decided the ruins were actually Persian and built by Darius the Great some two hundred years later.

French archaeologist Paul-Émile Botta (pictured) regarded Gobineau's Persian work as nonsense.

French archeologist Paul-Émile Botta published a scathing review of Traité des écritures cunéiformes in the Journal asiatique. He wrote the cuneiform texts at the Dur-Sharrukin were Akkadian, that Gobineau did not know what he was talking about, and the only reason he had even written the review was to prove that he had wasted his time reading the book. As Gobineau insistently pressed his thesis, the leading French Orientalist, Julius von Mohl of the Société asiatique, was forced to intervene in the dispute to argue that Gobineau's theories, which were to a large extent based on numerology and other mystical theories, lacked "scientific rigor", and the most favorable thing he could say was that he admired the "artistry" of Gobineau's thesis.

Continuing his Persian obsession, Gobineau published Histoire des Perses ("History of the Persians") in 1869. In it he did not attempt to distinguish between Persian history and legends treating the and the (a 12th-century poem presenting a legendary story of two Chinese emperors) as factual, reliable accounts of Persia's ancient history. As such, Gobineau began his history by presenting the Persians as Aryans who arrived in Persia from Central Asia and conquered the race of giants known to them as the Diws. Gobineau also added his own racial theories to the Histoire des Perses, explaining how Cyrus the Great had planned the migration of the Aryans into Europe making him responsible for the "grandeur" of medieval Europe. For Gobineau, Cyrus the Great was the greatest leader in history, writing: "Whatever we ourselves are, as Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Europeans of the nineteenth century, it is to Cyrus that we owe it", going on to call Cyrus as "the greatest of the great men in all human history".

In 1864, Gobineau became the French minister to Greece. During his time in Athens, which with Tehran were the only cities he was stationed in that he liked, he spent his time writing poetry and learning about sculpture when not traveling with Ernest Renan in the Greek countryside in search of ruins. Gobineau seduced two sisters in Athens, Zoé and Marika Dragoumis, who became his mistresses; Zoé remained a lifelong correspondent. However great his enthusiasm for ancient Greece, Gobineau was less than complimentary about modern Greece. He wrote that due to miscegenation the Greek people had lost the Aryan blood responsible for "the glory that was Greece". Now the Greeks had a mixture of Arab, Bulgarian, Turkish, Serbian and Albanian blood.

In 1832, although nominally independent, Greece had become a joint Anglo-French-Russian protectorate. As such the British, French and Russian ministers in Athens had the theoretical power to countermand any decision of the Greek cabinet. Gobineau repeatedly advised against France exercising this power, writing Greece was "the sad and living evidence of European ineptness and presumptuousness". He attacked the British attempt to bring Westminster-style democracy to Greece as bringing about "the complete decay of a barbarous land" while the accusing the French of being guilty of introducing the Greeks to "the most inept Voltairianism". About the " Eastern Question", Gobineau advised against French support for the irredentist Greek Megali Idea, writing the Greeks could not replace the Ottoman Empire, and if the Ottoman Empire should be replaced with a greater Greece, only Russia would benefit. Gobineau advised Paris:

The Greeks will not control the Orient, neither will the Armenians nor the Slav nor any Christian population, and, at the same time, if others were to come-even the Russians, the most oriental of them all-they could only submit to the harmful influences of this anarchic situation. [...] For me [...] there is no Eastern Question and if I had the honour of being a great government I should concern myself no longer with developments in these areas."

In the spring of 1866, Christian Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire on the island of Crete. Three emissaries arrived in Athens to ask Gobineau for French support for the uprising, saying it was well known that France was the champion of justice and the rights of "small nations". As France was heavily engaged in the war in Mexico Gobineau, speaking for Napoleon III, informed the Cretans to expect no support from France-they were on their own in taking on the Ottoman Empire. He had no sympathy with the Greek desire to liberate their compatriots living under Ottoman rule; writing to his friend Anton von Prokesch-Osten he noted: "It is one rabble against another".

Recall to France as a result of Cretan uprising

Gobineau called the Cretan uprising "the most perfect monument to lies, mischief and impudence that has been seen in thirty years". During the uprising, a young French academic Gustave Flourens, noted for his fiery enthusiasm for liberal causes, had joined the Cretean uprising and had gone to Athens to try to persuade the Greek government to support it. Gobineau had unwisely shown Flourens diplomatic dispatches from Paris showing both the French and Greek governments were unwilling to offend the Ottomans by supporting the Cretan uprising, which Flourens then leaked to the press. Gobineau received orders from Napoleon III to silence Flourens. On 28 May 1868, while Flourens was heading for a meeting with King George I, he was intercepted by Gobineau who had him arrested by the legation guards, put into chains and loaded onto the first French ship heading for Marseille. L'affaire Flourens became a cause célèbre in France with novelist Victor Hugo condemning Gobineau in an opinion piece in Le Tribute on 19 July 1868 for the treacherous way he had treated a fellow Frenchman fighting for Greek freedom. With French public opinion widely condemning the minister in Athens, Gobineau was recalled to Paris in disgrace.

In 1869, Gobineau was appointed the French minister to Brazil. At the time, France and Brazil did not have diplomatic relations at an ambassadorial level, only legations headed by ministers. Gobineau was unhappy the Quai d'Orsay had sent him to Brazil, which he viewed as an insufficiently grand posting. Gobineau landed in Rio de Janeiro during the riotously sensual Carnival, which disgusted him. From that moment on he detested Brazil, which he saw as a culturally backward and unsanitary place of diseases. He feared falling victim to the yellow fever that decimated the population of Brazil on a regular basis. Gobineau's major duties during his time in Brazil from March 1869 to April 1870 were to help mediate the end of the Paraguayan War and seek compensation after Brazilian troops looted the French legation in Asunción. He did so and was equally successful in negotiating an extradition treaty between the French Empire and the Empire of Brazil. He dropped hints to Emperor Pedro II that French public opinion favored the emancipation of Brazil's slaves. As slavery was the basis of Brazil's economy, and Brazil had the largest slave population in the Americas, Pedro II was unwilling to abolish slavery at this time.

As most Brazilians have a mixture of Portuguese, African and Indian ancestry, Gobineau saw the Brazilian people, whom he loathed, as confirming his theories about the perils of miscegenation. He wrote to Paris that Brazilians were "a population totally mixed, vitiated in its blood and spirit, fearfully ugly ... Not a single Brazilian has pure blood because of the pattern of marriages among whites, Indians and Negroes is so widespread that the nuances of color are infinite, causing a degeneration among the lower as well the upper classes". He noted Brazilians are "neither hard-working, active nor fertile". Based on all this, Gobineau reached the conclusion that all human life would cease in Brazil within the next 200 years on the grounds of "genetic degeneracy".

Gobineau was unpopular in Brazil. His letters to Paris show his complete contempt for everybody in Brazil, regardless of their nationality (except for the Emperor Pedro II), with his most damning words reserved for Brazilians. He wrote about Brazil: "Everyone is ugly here, unbelievably ugly, like apes". His only friend during his time in Rio was Emperor Pedro II, whom Gobineau praised as a wise and great leader, noting his blue eyes and blond hair as proof that Pedro was an Aryan. The fact Pedro was of the House of Braganza left Gobineau assured he had no African or Indian blood. Gobineau wrote: "Except for the Emperor there is no one in this desert full of thieves" who was worthy of his friendship.

Gobineau's attitudes of contempt for the Brazilian people led him to spend much of his time feuding with the Brazilian elite. In 1870 he was involved in a bloody street brawl with the son-in-law of a Brazilian senator who did not appreciate having his nation being put down. As a result of the brawl, Pedro II asked Paris to have his friend recalled, or he would declare him persona non-grata. Rather than suffer the humiliation of this happening to the French minister the Quai d'Orsay promptly recalled Gobineau.

In May 1870 Gobineau returned to France from Brazil. In a letter to Tocqueville in 1859 he wrote, "When we come to the French people, I genuinely favor absolute power", and as long as Napoleon III ruled as an autocrat, he had Gobineau's support. Gobineau had often predicted France was so rotten the French were bound to be defeated if they ever fought a major war. At the outbreak of the war with Prussia in July 1870, however, he believed they would win within a few weeks. After the German victory, Gobineau triumphantly used his own country's defeat as proof of his racial theories. He spent the war as the maire (mayor) of the little town of Trie in Oise department. After the Prussians occupied Trie, Gobineau established good relations with them and was able to reduce the indemnity imposed on Oise department.

Later, Gobineau wrote a book Ce qui est arrivé à la France en 1870 ("What Happened to France in 1870") explaining the French defeat was due to racial degeneration, which no publisher chose to publish. He argued the French bourgeoisie were "descended from Gallo-Roman slaves", which explained why they were no match for an army commanded by Junkers. Gobineau attacked Napoleon III for his plans to rebuild Paris writing: "This city, pompously described as the capital of the universe, is in reality only the vast caravanserai for the idleness, greed and carousing of all Europe."

In 1871, poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt who met Gobineau described him thus:

Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark rather prominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerky gait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, but distrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a bad listener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man of taste, a man of the world."

Despite his embittered view of the world and misanthropic attitudes, Gobineau was capable of displaying much charm when he wanted to. He was described by historian Albert Sorel as "a man of grace and charm" who would have made a perfect diplomat in Ancien Régime France.

In May 1872, Gobineau was appointed the French minister to Sweden. After arriving in Stockholm, he wrote to his sister Caroline: "This is the pure race of the North-that of the masters", calling the Swedes "the purest branch of the Germanic race". In contrast to France, Gobineau was impressed with the lack of social conflict in Sweden, writing to Dragoumis: "There is no class hatred. The nobility lives on friendly terms with the middle class and with the people at large". Gobineau argued that because of Sweden's remote location in Scandinavia, Aryan blood had been better preserved as compared to France. Writing about the accession of Oscar II to the Swedish throne in 1872 he said: "This country is unique ... I have just seen one king die and another ascend the throne without anyone doubling the guard or alerting a soldier". The essential conservatism of Swedish society also impressed Gobineau as he wrote to Pedro II: "The conservative feeling is amongst the most powerful in the national spirit and these people relinquish the past only step by step and with extreme caution".

Sweden presented a problem for Gobineau between reconciling his belief in an Aryan master race with his insistence that only the upper classes were Aryans. He eventually resolved this by denouncing the Swedes as debased Aryans after all. He used the fact King Oscar allowed Swedish democracy to exist and did not try to rule as an absolute monarch as evidence the House of Bernadotte were all weak and cowardly kings. By 1875, Gobineau was writing, "Sweden horrifies me" and wrote with disgust about "Swedish vulgarity and contemptibility".

In 1874, Gobineau met the homosexual German diplomat Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, in Stockholm and became very close to him. Eulenburg was later to recall fondly how he and Gobineau had spent hours during their time in Sweden under the "Nordic sky, where the old world of the gods lived on in the customs and habits of the people as well in their hearts." Gobineau later wrote that only two people in the entire world had ever properly understood his racist philosophy, namely Richard Wagner and Eulenburg.

An illustration from Gobineau's novel Nouvelle Asiatiques, published while he was in Sweden. The book reflected his long-standing interest in Persia and the Orient.

Gobineau encouraged Eulenburg to promote his theory of an Aryan master-race, telling him: "In this way you will help many people understand things sooner." Later, Eulenburg was to complain all of his letters to Gobineau had to be destroyed because "They contain too much of an intimately personal nature". During his time in Sweden, Gobineau became obsessed with the Vikings and became intent on proving he was descended from the Norse. His time in Stockholm was a very productive period from a literary viewpoint. He wrote Les Pléiades ("The Pleiades"), Les Nouvelles Asiatiques ("The New Asians"), La Renaissance, most of Histoire de Ottar Jarl, pirate norvégien conquérant du pays de Bray en Normandie et de sa descendance ("History of Ottar Jarl, Norwegian Pirate and Conqueror of Normandy and his Descendants") and completed the first half of his epic poem Amadis while serving as minister to Sweden.

In 1879, Gobineau attempted to prove his own racial superiority over the rest of the French with his pseudo-family history Histoire de Ottar Jarl. It begins with the line "I descend from Odin", and traces his supposed descent from the Viking Ottar Jarl. As the de Gobineau family first appeared in history in late 15th century Bordeaux, and Ottar Jarl-who may or may not have been a real person-is said to have lived in the 10th century, Gobineau had to resort to a great deal of invention to make his genealogy work. For him, the Essai, the Histoire des Perses and Histoire de Ottar Jarl comprised a trilogy, what the French critic Jean Caulmier called "a poetic vision of the human adventure", covering the universal history of all races in the Essai, to the history of the Aryan branch in Persia in Histoire des Perses to his own family's history in Histoire de Ottar Jarl.

During his time in Sweden, although remaining outwardly faithful to the Catholic Church, Gobineau privately abandoned his belief in Christianity. He was very interested in the pagan religion of the Vikings, which seemed more authentically Aryan to him. For him, maintaining his Catholicism was a symbol of his reactionary politics and rejection of liberalism, and it was for these reasons he continued to nominally observe Catholicism. Gobineau told his friend the Comte de Basterot that he wanted a Catholic burial only because the de Gobineaus had always been buried in Catholic ceremonies, not because of any belief in Catholicism.

For leaving his post in Stockholm without permission to join the Emperor Pedro II on his European visit, Gobineau was told in January 1877 to either resign from the Quai d'Orsay or be fired; he chose the former.

Gobineau spent his last years living in Rome, a lonely and embittered man whose principal friends were the Wagners and Eulenburg. He saw himself as a great sculptor and attempted to support himself by selling his sculpture.

Gobineau's ideas were influential in a number of countries, especially Romania, Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Brazil, both during his lifetime and after his death.

The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856 (rep. by Garland Pub., 1984).

Method of Reading Cuneiform Texts, Educational Society's Press, 1865.

Gobineau: Selected Political Writing, Michael D. Biddiss (ed.), Jonathan Cape, 1970.

The World of the Persians, J. Gifford, 1971.

The French Encounter with Africans, William B. Cohen, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

A Gentleman in the Outports: Gobineau and Newfoundland, Carleton University Press, 1993.

Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings, Geoffrey Nash (ed.), Routledge, 2008.

Typhaines Abbey: A Tale of the Twelfth Century, Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1869.

Romances of the East, D. Appleton and Company, 1878 [Rep. by Arno Press, 1973].

"The History of Gamber-Ali." In The Universal Anthology, Vol. XX, Merrill & Baker, 1899.

Five Oriental Tales, The Viking Press, 1925.

The Dancing Girl of Shamakha and other Asiatic Tales, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926.

Tales of Asia, Geoffrey Bles, 1947.

Mademoiselle Irnois and Other Stories, University of California Press, 1988.

The Golden Flower, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1924 [Rep. by Books for Libraries Press, 1968].

The Lucky Prisoner, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926 [Rep. by Bretano's, 1930].

The Crimson Handkerchief: and other Stories, Harper & Brothers, 1927 [Rep. by Jonathan Cape: London, 1929].

The Pleiads, A. A. Knopf, 1928.

Notes

1. ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). . W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 359. ISBN 978-0393314250. Gobineau was undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the nineteenth century. His writings strongly affected such intellectuals as Wanger and Nietzsche and inspired a social movement known as Gobinism.

2. ^ "Arthur de Gobineau French Diplomat, Writer, and Ethnologist". britannica.com. Archived from the original on 1 July 2016.

3. Richter, Melvin (1958). "The Study of Man. A Debate on Race: The Tocqueville-Gobineau Correspondence," ^ Commentary 25 (2), pp. 151-160.

4. Alexis de Tocqueville, ^ The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, John Lukacz (ed.), Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.

5. Beloff, Max (1986). "Tocqueville & Gobineau," ^ Encounter, Vol. LXVII, No. 1, pp. 29-31.

6. Tessitore, Aristide (2005). "Tocqueville and Gobineau on the Nature of Modern Politics," ^ The Review of Politics, Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 631-657.

7. ^ Richards, E. J. (1992), Brosman, Catharine Savage (ed.), "Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (14 July 1816-13 October 1882)", Dictionary of Literary Biography, A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, Tulane University: The Gale Group, vol. 123: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860-1900, pp. 101-117

8. J. A. Gobineau: ^ The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. J. B. Lippincott & Co, Philadelphia (1856), pp. 337-338

9. Mallory, J. P. (1991), ^ In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Culture and Myth, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 125.

10. ^ Nevenko Bartulin (4 July 2013). Honorary Aryans: National-Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-137-33912-6.

11. Among the groups which Gobineau classified as Aryan were the Hindus, Iranians, Hellenes, Celts, Slavs and Germanic people. ^ Ian Wood (September 2013). The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages. Oxford University Press. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-19-965048-4.

12. A. J. Woodman, 2009, ^ The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, p. 294. (The Germanic race was also regarded by Gobineau as beautiful, honourable and destined to rule: 'cette illustre famille humaine, la plus noble'. While was originally an endonym used only by Indo-Iranians, "Aryan" became, partly because of the Essai, a racial designation of a race, which Gobineau specified as 'la race germanique').

13. So that the reader not be left in ignorance as to who the Aryans are, Gobineau stated, ^ La race germanique était pourvue de toute l'énergie de la variété ariane ("The Germanic race was provided with all the energy of the Aryan race"). We see, then, that he presents a racist theory in which the Aryans, or Germans, are all that is good. Comparative literature. by American Comparative Literature Association. Modern Language Association of America. Comparative Literature Section.; University of Oregon. 1967, page 342

14. ^ Dreher, Robert Edward (1970). Arthur de Gobineau: An Intellectual Portrait. University of Wisconsin.

15. ^ "Arthur de Gobineau | French diplomat, writer, and ethnologist". Encyclopedia Britannica.

Bibliography

Akçam, Taner (2006). A Shameful Act - The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York, NY: Metropolitan. ISBN 978-0805079326.

Bell, Richard H. (2013). Wagner's Parsifal: An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey. Cascade Books.

Biddiss, Michael D. (1997). "History as Destiny: Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain and Spengler". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 7: 73-100. doi:10.2307/3679271. JSTOR 3679271. S2CID 163004517.

Blue, Gregory (1999). "Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the "Yellow Peril" and the Critique of Modernity"". Journal of World History. 10 (1): 93-139. doi:10.1353/jwh.2005.0003. JSTOR 20078751. S2CID 143762514.

Budil, Ivo (2008). Arthur Gobineau and Greece. A view of a man of letters and diplomat. Prague Papers on the History of International Relations.

Davies, Alan (1988). Infected Christianity: A Study of Modern Racism. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 9780773506510. JSTOR j.ctt80fx5.

Drayton, Richard (2011). "Gilberto Freyre and the Twentieth-Century Rethinking of Race in Latin America". Portuguese Studies. 27 (1): 43-47. doi:10.5699/portstudies.27.1.0043. JSTOR 10.5699/portstudies.27.1.0043. S2CID 161917205.

Fortier, Paul (Autumn 1967). "Gobineau and German Racism". Comparative Literature. 19 (4): 341-350. doi:10.2307/1769493. JSTOR 1769493.

Gobineau, Arthur de (1993). Michael Wilkshire (ed.). A Gentleman in the Outports: Gobineau and Newfoundland. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. ISBN 9780886292140. JSTOR j.ctt1cd0m3n.

Gobineau, Arthur de (1970). "Events in Asia". In Michael Biddiss, London (ed.). Gobineau Selected Political Writings.

Irwin, Robert (2016). Gobineau the Would be Orientalist. Vol. 26. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

(UK title: Wagner and Philosophy, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-029519-4)

Rowbotham, Arnold (1939). "Gobineau and the Aryan Terror". The Sewanee Review. 47 (2): 152-165. JSTOR 27535529.

Wilkshire, Michael (1993). "Introduction: Gobineau and Newfoundland". In Michael Wilkshire (ed.). Gentleman in the Outports: Gobineau and Newfoundland. Carleton Library Series. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 9780886292140. JSTOR j.ctt1cd0m3n.

Wright, Michelle (1999). Nigger Peasants from France: Missing Translations of American Anxieties on Race and the Nation. Vol. 22. Callaloo.

Further reading

Beasley, Edward (2010). The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, Taylor & Francis.

Biddiss, Michael D. (1970). "Prophecy and Pragmatism: Gobineau's Confrontation with Tocqueville," The Historical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4.

Biddiss, Michael D. (1997). "History as Destiny: Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain and Spengler," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. VII.

Blue, Gregory (1999). "Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the 'Yellow Peril,' and the Critique of Modernity," Journal of World History, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Dreher, Robert Edward (1970). Arthur de Gobineau, an Intellectual Portrait, University of Wisconsin.

Gillouin, Rene (1921). "Mystical Race Theories," The Living Age, No. 4015.

House, Roy Temple (1923). "Gobineau, Nietzsche, and Spiess," The Nation, 11 April.

Kale, Steven (2010). "Gobineau, Racism, and Legitimism: A Royalist Heretic in Nineteenth-Century France," Modern Intellectual History, Volume 7, Issue 01.

Magee, Bryan (2002). "The Tristan Chord". New York: Owl Books (UK Title: "Wagner and Philosophy", Penguin Books Ltd.).

Rahilly, A. J. (1916). "Race and Super-Race," The Dublin Review, Vol. CLIX.

Richards, Robert J. (2013). Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-05893-1.

Rowbotham, Arnold H. (1929). The Literary Works of Count de Gobineau, H. Champion.

Schemann, Ludwig (1979). Gobineau, Arno Press.

Seillière, Ernest (1914). "The Life and Work of Count Arthur de Gobineau." In The German Doctrine of Conquest, Maunsel & Co.

Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1928). "Anthropo-Racial, Selectionist, and Hereditarist School." In Contemporary Sociological Theories, Harper & Bros., pp. 219-308.

Spring, Gerald Max (1932). The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau, New York, [s.n.].

Valette, Rebecca M. (1969). Arthur de Gobineau and the Short Story, University of North Carolina Press.

Boissel, Jean (1993). Gobineau: Biographie. Mythes et Réalité, Berg International.

Buenzod, Janine (1967). La Formation de le Pensée de Gobineau et l'Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines, Librairie A. G. Nizet.

Devaux, Philippe (1937-38). "L'Aristotélisme et le Vitalisme de Gobineau," Revue Franco-belge, December/Janvier .

Dreyfus, Robert (1905). La Vie et les Prophéties du Comte de Gobineau, Calmann-Lévy.

Faÿ, Bernard (1930). Le Comte Arthur de Gobineau et la Grèce, H. Champion.

Gahyva, Helga (2002). O Inimigo do Século - Um Estudo Sobre Arthur de Gobineau 1816-1882, IUPERJ.

Kleinecke, Paul (1902). Gobineau's Rassenphilosophie, Haack.

Lacretelle, Jacques de (1924). Quatre Études sur Gobineau, Á la Lampe d'Aladdin.

Lange, Maurice (1924). Le Comte Arthur de Gobineau, Étude Biographique et Critique, Faculté de Lettres de Strasbourg.

Raeders, George (1988). O Inimigo Cordial do Brasil: O Conde de Gobineau no Brasil, Paz & Terra.

Riffaterre, Michael (1957). Le Style des Pléiades de Gobineau, E. Droz.

Schemann, Ludwig (1913-16). Gobineau: eine Biographie, 2 Vol., K. J. Trübner.

Schemann, Ludwig (1934). Gobineau und die Deutsche Kultur, B.G. Teubner.

Smith, Annette (1984). Gobineau et l'Histoire Naturelle, E. Droz.

Spiess, Camille (1917). Impérialismes; la Conception Gobinienne de la Race, E. Figuière & Cie.

Thomas, Louis (1941). Arthur de Gobineau, Inventeur du Racisme (1816-1882), Mercure de France.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau ( French: ; 14 July 1816 - 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific race theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race.

# data[].attributes.headline
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859): discover more about an early sociologist

# data[].attributes.subject
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859): discover more about an early sociologist

# data[].attributes.body
He is best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analysed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. He noted that the theories which Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was talking about were dangerous for ‘human freedom’, as events like the Holocaust sadly show.

Watch this short video about Tocqueville’s work and make notes about the key factos:

# data[].attributes.headline
Structuralism: the relatively new study and theory to cultural studies

# data[].attributes.subject
Structuralism: the relatively new study and theory to cultural studies

# data[].attributes.body
Structuralism is the  name applied to the analysis of cultural systems. Watch this short video about structuralism to get a better sense of what it is and how it has been applied to cultural studies.

Follow this link

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Two Early Approaches: Structuralism and Functionalism

# data[].attributes.headline
Claude Levi-Srauss (1908 – 2009): a key figure behind structuralism 

# data[].attributes.subject
Claude Levi-Srauss (1908 – 2009): a key figure behind structuralism 

# data[].attributes.body
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French social anthropologist and is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism [2]. He viewed cultures as systems of communication, and he constructed models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them.

TO find out more about the life and work of Levi-Strauss, follow this link:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The fame of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s. He was one of those French intellectuals - like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur - whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition.

As a result, these French writers have seemed more stimulating to some Anglo-Saxon thinkers, working in intellectually more imaginative, but perhaps less rigorous, areas such as literature, history or sociology than the home-grown product. Yet it is something of an irony that Lévi-Strauss should have been thought of in this way, as he considered himself, above all, a technical anthropologist, and he was a little surprised, if not also a little suspicious, of the enthusiasm for structuralism manifested by students of literature and others. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that he relished the literary fame that his work acquired, especially for his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques.

Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels into a family of French artists, and followed a fairly typical career for a successful French humanities student. He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and then the Sorbonne, where in 1928, at an exceptionally early age and with great success, he passed the formidable philosophy agrégation examination. He consequently became a kind of high-level school teacher in Laon, in Picardy, a type of post that was often a first step towards becoming a university teacher.

He soon became disillusioned with philosophy, however, because of what he saw as its sterile self-reference and mannerisms. He especially disliked the utilitarian and moralistic forms of philosophy dominant in France at the time. For a while he also became active in the French socialist movement but, subsequently, he seems to have lost interest in politics and was surprisingly uncommitted during the dramatic events of postwar France. Instead he became interested in anthropology, after reading the American anthropologist Robert Lowie, partly because he realised that the richness of the cultures then labelled as primitive gave the lie to the optimistic evolutionism of writers such as Auguste Comte.

As a result of this interest in anthropology he was proposed by the sociologist Célestin Bouglé as a member of a group of French academics who were being seconded to the new French-sponsored University of São Paulo in Brazil. He accepted a professorship in 1935, largely in the mistaken belief that he would be able to study the Amerindians. He did attempt to carry out a certain amount of anthropological research from there, but it was difficult, and in 1939 he resigned from the post to carry out more systematic fieldwork among the Nambikwara and other indigenous peoples of the Mato Grosso and Brazilian Amazon. Although this field work has always been considered to be rather poor by many anthropologists, I find it rather impressive given the short time he spent with the Amerindians. More importantly it confirmed him in his sympathy and respect for the culture of the indigenous peoples of South America and also in his growing scepticism towards the philosophical and artistic achievements of the literate civilisations of the Old World.

This attitude must have been confirmed by the events of the second world war. First, Lévi-Strauss was called up for a very short time and experienced the humiliation of the fall of France and the armistice, and then he was faced by the growing discrimination and persecution against Jews in Vichy France. In 1941, he managed to escape and ultimately made his way to New York, where, the next year, together with other French intellectuals, he was given a post at the New School for Social Research. There, he, the theologian Jacques Maritain and others founded a kind of Free French university, the École Libre des Hautes Études. After the war he stayed on in the US until 1948, working as cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington. On his return to France, he held a number of increasingly important posts at institutions, including the Museé de l'Homme in Paris, where he served as assistant director (1949-50), and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he was director of studies in anthropology (1950-74). In 1959 he was elected to a chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. Among many other honours he was, in 1973, awarded the Erasmus prize and elected to the French Academy.

It was during Lévi-Strauss's period in the US that "structural anthropology" became constructed. This led to what has come to be known as "structuralism" - a term used for a variety of theories both in anthropology and beyond, which, although they claim to be derived from his ideas, do not always bear much relation to his work. It is striking how, in spite of the immense respect with which he is treated, especially in France, he has no direct followers or students. Many claim and have claimed to be structuralists but it usually turns out that only a limited aspect of his thought has an influence on them, and at worst the adoption of the label "structuralist" was merely a matter of passing fashion. He is a lonely, if imposing, figure in the history of thought.

Levi-Strauss's own structuralism is a personal amalgam of a naturalist approach to the study of human beings and a philosophical attitude derived from this. The strictly scientific aspect was largely the result of the combination of two types of theoretical influences. The first has to do with his contact with American cultural anthropology, a relation that is ambiguous since it is so much "at a distance", as was to be his attitude to all other contemporary theoretical influences. Secondly, he came into contact with structural linguistics, a behaviouristic amalgam of European and American theories, and particularly the more imaginative work of Roman Jacobson, the Russian theoretician of language who was also at the New School at the time.

While in New York, Lévi-Strauss immersed himself in the great body of anthropological accounts of North and South Amerindians that early US anthropologists and linguists had been accumulating for more than a century. The data collected from the Amerindians and its complexity delighted him, and made him react permanently against reductionist explanations of culture, which implicitly denied the intellectual achievement that indigenous mythology and social thought represented. The contact with the structural linguists suggested to him an approach that could both generalise and remain true to the richness and specificity of the original material. Thus Levi-Strauss adopted the term "structural" from a very particular school of linguistics that flourished in the 1940s and 50s, which combined the influence of the Swiss, Ferdinand de Saussure, with that of the American Leonard Bloomfield.

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

For him anthropology was scientific and naturalistic, that is scientific in the way that structural linguistics had become scientific. By looking at the transformations of language that occur as new utterances are generated, by using the tools that a particular language makes available, structural linguistics was able, so Lévi-Strauss believed, to understand not only the irreducible specificities of a particular language, but also the principles that made their production possible. In this way, linguistics, as he understood it, was a branch of the humanities and a natural science that is able to connect directly with psychology and neurology.

By studying the richness of cultural forms and their continued transformations, much the same was to be achieved by anthropology, which was to be both a cognitive and a historical science. Thus, the meaning of symbols and concepts had to be studied both within the context of the working of the brain and the specificity of the historical flow of a particular culture. Anthropology was for Lévi-Strauss one of the cognitive sciences. It was to be compatible with recent discoveries concerning the working of the brain, although as time went on he seems to have given up keeping up with developments in this field. He was, however, insistent that although the cognitive could explain structure, it could not explain content.

This is the programme lying behind all of Lévi-Strauss's major works. But, in a sense, it is also a manifestation of a much more fundamental approach and mood from modern English-speaking anthropologists. In contrast to most professional anthropologists, whose work often seems contained within the controversies of their time and which lacks a general theory of human nature, Lévi-Strauss writes as though he were a naturalist from far away, observing our planet and the ecology of its different species, including the human species, with an Olympian lack of involvement.

He was thus interested in the human species in general terms but, because he knew that for 99% of its existence, humankind has consisted of small groups with very low population densities living in close interaction with a multitude of other living species, he considered the study of peoples such as the pre-contact Amazonian Indians to be far more important and relevant than the details of the short-lived modern industrialised world.

This approach led him to pay particular attention to Amerindian myths, the study of which was the subject of most of his writing since the 1960s. In particular, it is the subject of the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-71). For Lévi-Strauss, Amerindian myths are the Indian's speculation on the condition of interdependence of living things. Thus a myth about the origins of wild pigs is related to marriage rules and to another myth about the benefits of cooking.

Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France in 2001. Photograph: Joel Robine/AFP/Getty Images

This is, for him, a speculation not so much utilitarian as philosophical. Human thought is, of course, governed by the structuring capacity of the human brain but not explained by it. In this light, the myths are the record of the true history of the principal philosophical endeavour of mankind, and Lévi-Strauss not only wanted to record this endeavour, but also to join it. The myths' subject matter is his subject matter. Thus, this most aloof of intellectuals saw himself as a participant in the Amerindian dialogues he analysed without claiming any kind of precedence for himself. Because the myths are about the interrelationship of living things, it is essential for him to understand the natural history of all species in order to understand our own natural history.

Understanding, or participating, in the ecological reflection of humans such as the Amerindians is not only what he considered most important to study for himself as an anthropologist: it also coloured his values. These, from time to time, particularly towards the end of his life, he allowed himself to make public. He repeatedly expressed his distaste for the narrowness and sterility of much post-neolithic thought, and its obsession with the exploitation of other living things rather than simply reflecting on the latter's complexity and mutual relationships. As a result, he became something of a hero to certain modern ecological ideologues. For Lévi-Strauss, writing and formal education are just as likely to lead to philosophical impoverishment as to anything else.

There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.

This central philosophical tenet of his approach has often been forgotten, partly because of some subsequent writers, such as Foucault or Derrida, who although they acknowledged his influence, were bizarrely labelled as post-structuralists, as though they differed from him in this respect. They were then credited with the idea of the "death of the subject" while, in this, they simply followed in his footsteps. Yet, the philosophical implications of this position not only implicitly underlay so much of his thought, but were made quite explicit in the polemic against Sartre's glorification of individual choice, which forms the final part of Lévi-Strauss's most adventurous book, The Savage Mind (1962).

Of course, his theories have been much criticised, and few would now subscribe to them in the way that they were originally formulated, but nonetheless many anthropologists, including myself, are continually amazed and awed by the fact that, through the use of a theory that many consider flawed, or at least rather vague, Lévi-Strauss gained the most illuminating and unexpected insights in almost all fields of social and cultural anthropology.

Given his personality and, indeed, his theories, the extraordinary lionisation he received on the occasion of his 100th birthday seems ironic. It was as if the French establishment and the French state had decided that he was suddenly a major diplomatic asset. He had received drawers full of medals and prizes from all over the world and, as the international fame of its public intellectuals is the kind of thing France has always prided itself on, it made sure the birthday did not go unnoticed. Lévi-Strauss had become the last survivor of these great beasts such as Sartre, Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and, what was more, he was politically uncontroversial. Also, the genuine interest of the previous French president Jacques Chirac in the culture of native peoples and in the acquisition of "primitive art" encouraged this apotheosis of a person who, for the general French public represented, above all, the lure of primitive exoticism.

So, when the great date came, nearly every French magazine had his photo on the cover. President Sarkozy went to his flat to wish him a happy birthday, and the ministry of foreign affairs helped to finance seminars in his honour in places as far apart as Iceland and India. The imposing amphitheatre of the newly created collection of indigenous art at the Quai Branly museum, in Paris, was named after him. Most significant of all, a large part of his work was republished in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. This honour is normally reserved for dead greats such as Racine or Aristotle, whose writings are thereby placed in a kind of leather-bound bibliophilic mausoleum and printed on paper normally only used for bibles.

This treatment is significant because, as Vincent Debaene points out in a cheeky introduction to the volume, France much prefers to represent its scientists and thinkers as great literary figures, rather than celebrate what they said or discovered.

And indeed all this adulation hardly considered seriously the core of Levi-Strauss's work, the groundbreaking analysis of kinship systems that he published on his return to France in 1947 as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, consisting of a detailed study of those societies where family ties determine who people must marry, or the minute examinations of North and South American myth. All these public tributes seem to obscure his prime identity as a professional anthropologist struggling with the basic traditional questions of the discipline.

We do not know what he thought of all this, since by then he felt too ill to respond, but his often-expressed preference for the anonymous creator, which seems to accord so well with his personality, does not square with all this fuss. He hated public occasions and was a very private person. He loved to be out of step with the received "correct" view of the moment. He was uncomfortable with disciples and fled from adulation.

To the members of his team in Paris, the image he evoked above all was the nearly permanently closed doors of his study. This is not to say that he was in any way a recluse. He was secretly warm and had a delightful sense of humour. He was charming and very considerate and respectful towards whoever he was dealing with, irrespective of status. I remember him at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, on the occasion of his being given an honorary degree, listening to students telling him about what they got from his work and not allowing them to be interrupted by the French ambassador, who failed in the attempt to barge in and drag him away in the direction of more important guests. The nearest he approached discourtesy was a faint hint of irony, but on the whole he preferred to be alone, working, reading and accumulating ever more details about the lives of the native Americans whom he so admired.

He married Dina Dreyfus in 1932, Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and Monique Roman in 1954, and had a son by each of his second and third wives - Laurent and Matthieu. He is survived by Monique and his sons.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, born 28 November 1908; died 30 October 2009

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The fame of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s.