French diplomat and writer, minister for foreign affairs in 1849; known for his theory of the Aryan master race.

His incomplete Ce qui est arrivé à la France en 1870, first published posthumously in 1918, which earned him the epithet "father of racist ideology," spoke of France as a decaying society, and claimed that the French ruling class was unsuited to sustaining France's self-styled intellectual superiority because descended from Gallo-Roman slaves. Prussians were, in his view, the natural leaders of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and had no need of democracy (a view he began to doubt after 1870). His voluminous Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853–55) is today considered as one of the earliest examples of scientific racism.

Schenker refers to Gobineau in his "The Mission of German Genius," the lead article of Der Tonwille, Heft 1 (1921).

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