| Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882, Turin, Italy), آرتور دو گوبینو - نویسنده، خاورشناس، شاعر، تاریخ نگار، سیاستمدار و بست دهندۀ تئوری "نژاد برتر"ـ He was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the racialist theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853--1855). De Gobineau is credited as being the father of modern racial demography. Gobineau's father was a government official and staunch royalist, and his mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a royal tax official. He was not, however, a nobleman, having added the 'count' to his name himself (William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, Bloomington, Ind, 1980, p. 217). In the later years of the July Monarchy, Gobineau made his living writing serialized fiction (romans-feuilletons) and contributing to reactionary periodicals. He struck up a friendship and had voluminous correspondence with Alexis de Tocqueville, who brought him into the foreign ministry while he was foreign minister during the Second Republic. Gobineau was a successful diplomat for the Second French Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia (Iran), before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three races - "black", "white", and "yellow" - were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified ... |
