Arthur de Gobineau

Gobineau was born into an aristocratic family under the Ancien Régime and spent his life mourning its loss, a Legitimist who despised the French Revolution and the democratic churn that followed. In the wake of the 1848 revolutions, he published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, arguing that aristocrats were superior to commoners because they carried purer Aryan blood, untainted by interbreeding with inferior races. France ignored him. Pro-slavery Americans like Josiah C. Nott stripped a thousand pages from his work - including his contempt for their own mixed population - and published what remained as validation. Germany embraced him outright: his ideas seeded a movement called Gobinism, influenced Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and decades later gave Nazi ideologues a text they could claim as prophecy. He spent his later years as a diplomat in Persia, Brazil, Greece, and Sweden, writing novels and travel essays that no one remembers.