Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines

Paris: Librairie De Firmin Didot Freres, 1853. Hitler's French Mentor

GOBINEAU, [Joseph-Arthur Comte] de. Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1853-1855.

First edition. Four volumes, octavo (8 3/8 x 5 1/4 inches; 212 x 134 mm).

Contemporary half mauve cloth over dark sprinkled boards. Spines ruled in blind and lettered in gilt. Spines a bit faded. Foxing throughout, front hinge of Volume I cracked but sound. Bookplates. A beautiful set.

"The French Diplomatist and man of letters, Gobineau (1816-1882), has, through the ‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races'—his one excursion into the realms of anthropology and sociology—exerted an influence upon European thought and action which is quite disproportionate to its scholarly insignificance and inconsequential argumentation.

The men of the Action Française, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were, at one remove, the disciples and propagandists of Gobineau's most outrageous ideas. Gobineau's racial theories were based on a complete misunderstanding of the positicism of Comte and the reasearches of Prichard into the physiological differences of the various human races. Fortified by the innate arrogance of a scion of an ancien régime family and by his observations as an envoy in the Near and Middle East, he championed the theory, since entirely disproved, that ‘race' is a permanent and immutable phenomenon, and he proclaimed the unchallengeable superiority of the white race over all others. Within the white race, Gobineau assigned the supreme position to the ‘nordic'—or as he fatuously called them ‘aryan'—peoples who, thanks to their praiseworthy qualities of hardiness and lust for power, are predestined to rule the rest of mankind.

This farrago of biological nonsense, wishful romanticism and imperialistic dreams was lapped up eagerly by the French and German intellectuals. The German enthusiasm for Gobineau—the German translation of the essai went through several editions—is the less comprehensible in that Gobineau thought very poorly of the ‘German race', which he considered a mixture of Celts and Slavs with hardly any pure ‘nordic' blood. But there was enough substance in Gobineau's book to provide nourishment for the growth of the pan-germanism and national self-adulation, and seemingly to justify anti-semitic and anti-slav excesses. Hence derived the ‘superman' and the glorious ‘blond beast' of Nietzsche and the germanomania and anti-semitism of Wagner..." (Printing and the Mind of Man).

Printing and the Mind of Man 335.

HBS 66928.

$9,500.