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The Neglected (V) Gobineau and the Illusions of Progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Michael Biddiss
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WHEN IN OCTOBER 1982 LE MONDE COMMEMORATED THE centenary of Arthur de Gobineau's death, it borrowed as headline Jean Mistler's description of him as ‘le plus grand méconnu du dix-neuvième siècle’. Despite its hyperbole, that judgment is useful in alerting us to an absorbing case partly of neglect and partly of misrepresentation, and to the circumstances under which this pioneer of Aryan racist ideology was posthumously rescued from the first of these fates only at the price of condemnation to the second. There are both personal and public reasons why Gobineau has proved so difficult for his own contemporaries and for posterity to assess. Much of the problem arises from the enigmatic complexity of the man himself: a figure (in Jean Gaulmier's phrase) ‘tantôt fascinant, tantôt insupportable’, a self-styled aristocrat, a charming yet fiercely pessimistic autodidact, an energetic novelist, poet and dramatist as well as diplomat, journalist, historian and orientalist, and someone who bore the stamp both of polymath and of charlatan. But the image has been blurred also because of the impact of wider historical experience, concerning above all the record of Franco-German mutual hostility. From whichever side of the Rhine they came, the attempts at viewing Gobineau through the gunsmoke of 1870–1 were already confusing enough even before the turmoil of 1914–18 further obscured the scene. Further misperception thrived once Nazism started to implement across France and Europe at large a vision of Teutonic racial destiny which was widely, yet wrongly, taken to reflect directly Gobineau's own ideas. The points of disjunction between those beliefs and what actually became known as ‘gobinism’ need to be recognized. Even so, that awareness is enhanced by acknowledging also that Gobineau's whole mode of thinking about race made him singularly liable to such distortion. In short, he himself had quite gratuitously created his very own hostages to intellectual fortune.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1984 , pp. 348 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

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References

1 ‘Introduction’ to Gobineau, Oeuvres, J. Gaulmier (ed.), Vol. 1, Paris, Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1983, p. lvii.

2 See de Gobineau, Louis, Mémoires, Puraye, J. (ed.), Paris, érasme, 1955.Google Scholar

3 See the chronological listing of these pieces in Oeuvres, Vol. 1, pp. lxvi–lxxv; also, Boissel, J., Gobineau, un Don Quichotte tragique, Paris, Hachette, 1981,Google Scholar ch. 4.

4 See Degros, M. (ed.), Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et d’Arthur de Gobineau, Paris, Gallimard, 1959 Google Scholar (cited as CGT, and being Vol. 9 of J. P. Mayer’s collection of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres Complètes); also, Biddiss, M. D., ‘Prophecy and Pragmatism: Gobineau’s Confrontation with Tocqueville’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 13, no. 4, 1970, pp. 611–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 8 August 1843, in CGT, p. 43.

6 Gobineau to his sister, 15 April 1843, Bibliothèque Nationale, Strasbourg, MS 3518, item 99.

7 The evidence comes from notes as well as letters: see the material assembled by J. P. Mayer in the Appendices to CGT, pp. 309–84.

8 See J. Gaulmier, ‘Gobineau, la décentralisation, et La Revue Provinciale’, études Gobiniennes, 1971, pp. 21–68; Biddiss, M. D., Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, pp. 70–81.Google Scholar

9 The best scholarly edition is now that very recently presented in Oeuvres, Vol. 1, pp. 133–1174 (text) and 1216–1471 (notes).

10 Ibid., pp. 138–9.

11 See Poliakov, L., The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, London, Chatto & Windus, 1974.Google Scholar

12 Oeuvres, Vol. 1, p. 1142.

13 The word ‘entropy’ had not yet been coined, but historians of nineteenth-century political thought might advantageously pay greater attention to the use (or even the avoidance) of such images as the principle was already conjuring up amongst physicists. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, London, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 153–6,Google Scholar provides a valuable starting-point.

14 This Saint-Simonian constitutes an outstandingly interesting and, until quite recently, neglected case of potential influence on Gobineau: see Boissel, J., Victor Courtet, premier théoricien de la hiérarchie des races: Contribution à l’histoire de la philosophie politique du romantisme, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1972.Google Scholar For the most relevant aspects of the wider intellectual context, see Buenzod, J., La Formation de la pensée de Gobineau et ‘L’Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines’, Paris, Nizet, 1967;Google Scholar and Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology, especially pp. 103–11.

15 Three Faces of Fascism, London, Weidenfeld, 1965, p. 286.

16 Political Ideas, London, Hutchinson, 1966, p. 206.

17 See, in this same series, Mendilow, J., ‘Carlyle’s Political Philosophy: Towards a Theory of Catch-All Extremism’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 18, Winter 1983, p. 69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where a similar argument is presented, though with a more fundamentally purposive import than can be properly applied to Gobineau’s case.

18 ‘Historical Inevitability’, in Four Essays on Liberty, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 106; see also Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edition, London, Allen & Unwin, 1963, p. 469.Google Scholar

19 For a lively commentary on the survival of some such tendency, see Watt’s, D. C. recent Inaugural Lecture, What About the People?: Abstraction and Reality in History and the Social Sciences, London School of Economics, 1983.Google Scholar

20 See Barzun, J., The French Race: Theories of its Origins and their Social and Political Implications, New York, Columbia University Press, 1932;Google Scholar and, for the wider European scope of the race/class theme, Poliakov, Aryan Myth, Part 1.

21 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 172.

22 17 November 1853, CGT, p. 203.

23 See particularly his letter of 20 March 1856, ibid., pp. 257–62.

24 The case for its operation with regard to the career of the coiner of ‘positivism’ is succinctly put within the present author’s essay on Comte in Wintle, J. (ed.), Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, 1800–1914, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 130–2.Google Scholar

25 See Popper, K. R., The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed., London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, Vol. 1, pp. 285–6.Google Scholar

26 ‘The Study of Man – a Debate on Race: The Tocqueville-Gobineau Correspondence’, Commentary, Vol. 25, 1958, p. 154.

27 Oeuvres, Vol. 1, p. 1278.

28 See ibid., Vol. 2, 1983, for the best critical presentation of the most important texts produced between 1855 and 1872. The third and final volume (forthcoming) in Gaulmier’s editorial project for Gallimard will cover the remaining years down to Gobineau’s death in 1882.

29 Gaulmier, J., Spectre de Gobineau, Paris, Pauvert, 1965,Google Scholar proved seminal in this regard, as did the launching in 1966 of the études Gobiniennes, Paris, Klincksieck, as an occasional journal of relevant report and debate.

30 See L’Univers romanesque de Gobineau, Paris, Gallimard, 1981.

31 Ibid., p. 22.

32 These two texts are due to receive virtually definitive editorial treatment as part of Oeuvres, Vol. 3. References made in this article are to the following editions, both prepared by Mistler, Jean: Les Pléiades, Paris, Livre de poche, 1960;Google Scholar La Renaissance, Monaco, Rocher, 1947, containing not only the ‘scènes historiques’ of the drama itself but also Gobineau’s linking expository essays which were omitted from the first edition of 1877.

33 Letter of 7 October 1872, in Correspondance entre le Comte de Gobineau et le Comte de Prokesch-Osten, Serpeille de Gobineau, C. (ed.), Paris, Plon, 1933. p. 361.Google Scholar

34 See, in this same series, Mommsen, W. J., ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Defender of Culture and Prophet of Doom’, Govemment and Opposition, Vol. 18, Autumn 1983, pp. 463–4.Google Scholar

35 La Renaissance, p. 101.

36 See Les Pléiades, pp. 28–36; also, Smith, A. J., ‘Un Bestiaire de Gobineau’, études Gobiniennes, 1976-78, pp. 155–70.Google Scholar Baudelaire’s remark ‘From freedom cherished impiously is born a new tyranny, the tyranny of beasts - zoocracy’ is quoted on p. 9 of a work by Carter, A. E. which establishes a useful general framework for the study of cultural pessimism on the part of Gobineau and his compatriots: The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830–1900, Toronto University Press, 1958.Google Scholar

37 See Barrows, S., Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981,Google Scholar ch. 2 especially

38 See Mommsen, ‘Jacob Burckhardt’, p. 475.

39 This appeared in the posthumous two-volume reissue of 1884: see Oeuvres, Vol. 1, pp. 1167–74 (text) and 1457–71 (notes).

40 See ‘Ein Urtheil über die jetzige Weltlage’, Bayreuther Blätter, Vol. 4, May 1881, pp. 121–40. The original French text was published four years later in the Revue du Monde Latin, Vol. 6, pp. 397–418. Extracts from this important piece are provided in Gobineau: Selected Political Writings, Biddiss, M. D. (ed.), London, Cape, 1970, pp. 235–47.Google Scholar

41 See, for example, the letters of 10 January and 5 February 1874, in Comte de Gobineau/Mère Bénédicte de Gobineau, Correspondance, 1872–82, Duff, A. B. (ed.), Paris, Mercure de France, 1958, Vol. 1, pp. 101–3;Google Scholar and compare the concluding passage of the Essai, in Oeuvres, Vol. 1, p. 1166.

42 For succinct commentary on the twentieth-century retreat from utopian ideals see Passmore, J., The Perfectibility of Man, London, Duckworth, 1970,Google Scholar ch. 13.

43 See his letter to Gobineau of 30 July 1856, CGT, p. 267.

44 See Schüler, W., Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der wilhelminischen ära, Munster, Aschendorff, 1971;Google Scholar also, Karbaum, M., Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele, 1876–1976, Regensburg, Bosse, 1976.Google Scholar

45 Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Munich, Bruckmann, 1899. Note the fine recent study by Field, G. G.: Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, New York, Columbia University Press, 1981,Google Scholar in which ch. 4 & 5 especially throw valuable light on Chamberlain’s often very critical approach to Gobineau.

46 See particularly Schemann’s Gobineau: eine Biographie, 2 vols, Strassburg, Trübner, 1913–16, and Gobineaus Rassenwerk, Stuttgart, Fromann, 1910; also, Gaulmier, J., Gobineau et sa fortune littéraire, Bordeaux, Ducros, 1971,Google Scholar ch. 4. The first of these titles is now available again in facsimile reprint (New York, Arno, 1979) with an introduction by D. C. J. Lee.

47 See Gaulmier, Gobineau et sa fortune littèraire, ch. 6.

48 See M. Steinkühler, L’“Essai” dans l’enseignement du Troisème Reich: Contribution à l’étude du gobinisme en Allemagne, typescript 1961, deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Strasbourg.

49 See Gaulmier, Gobineau et sa fortune littéraire, p. 120. Thomas, Louis, Les Précurseurs: Arthur de Gobineau, Inventeur du racisme, 1816–1882, Paris, Mercure de France, 1941,Google Scholar is an antisemitic diatribe, showing particularly well how Gobineau’s ideas could be twisted so as to suit the occupiers’ purposes.

50 See, for example, Oeuvres, Vol. 1, p. 195.