Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was a French aristocrat who was born on July 14, 1816 and died on October 13, 1882. He is best known for helping to make racism more acceptable by using scientific racist theory and "racial demography" and for coming up with the idea of the "Aryan master race." People of his time knew him as a novelist, diplomat, and travel writer. He was an elitist who wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races right after the Revolutions of 1848. In it, he said that aristocrats were better than commoners and that they had more Aryan genes because they didn't mix with people from lower-class races as much. Richard Wagner, his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Romanian politician Professor A. C. Cuza, and the leaders of the Nazi Party, who later edited and re-published his work, were all influenced by his writings. They also inspired a social movement in Germany called Gobinism.
