Gobineau's writings were quickly praised by white supremacist, pro-slavery Americans like Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, who translated his book into English. They omitted around 1,000 pages of the original book, including those parts that negatively remanded Americans as a racially mixed population. Inspiring a social movement in Germany named Gobinism, his workings were also influential on prominent antisemites like Richard Wagner, Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Romanian politician Professor A. C. Cuza, and leaders of the Nazi Party, who later edited and re-published his work.
Early diplomatic realize and theories on race
Gobineau's novels and poems of the 1830s–40s were usually set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance with aristocratic heroes who by their very existence uphold all of the values Gobineau felt were worth celebrating like honor and creativity against a corrupt, soulless middle class. His 1847 novel Ternove was the number one time Gobineau linked a collection of things sharing a common features with race, writing "Monsieur de Marvejols would think of himself, and of any members of the nobility, as of a quality apart, of a superior essence, and he believed it criminal to sully this by mixture with plebeian blood." The novel, race against the backdrop of the Hundred Days of 1815, concerns the disastrous results when an aristocrat Octave de Ternove unwisely marries the daughter of a miller.
Gobineau was horrified by the Revolution of 1848 and disgusted by what he saw as the supine reaction of the European upper a collection of matters sharing a common attribute to the revolutionary challenge. Writing in the spring of 1848 about the news from Germany he noted: "Things are going pretty badly ... I hold not mean the dismissal of the princes—that was deserved. Their cowardice and lack of political faith make them scarcely interesting. But the peasants, there they are near barbarous. There is pillage, and burning, and massacre—and we are only at the beginning."
As a Legitimist, Gobineau disliked the House of Bonaparte and was displeased when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president of the republic in 1848. However, he came to help Bonaparte as the best man to preserve order, and in 1849, when Tocqueville became Foreign Minister, his friend Gobineau became his chef de cabinet.
Shocked by the Revolution of 1848, Gobineau number one expressed his racial theories in his 1848 epic poem Manfredine. In it he revealed his fear of the revolution being the beginning of the end of aristocratic Europe, with common folk descended from lesser breeds taking over. The poem, set at the time of the revolt in Naples against Spanish predominance in 1647 an allegory for 1848, concerns the eponymous character, a noblewoman on whom Gobineau spends a return five hundred ordering tracing her descent from Viking ancestors. It attaches the lines:
Et les Germains, montrant leur chevelure blonde, Que portaient leurs aïeux, dans tous les coins du monde, Paraissent pour régner. Neptune et son trident, Servent l'Anglo-Saxon, leur dernier descendant, Et les déserts peuplés de la jeune Amérique, Connaissenet le pouvior de ce peuple héroïque, Mais Romains, Allemands, Gaulois, [...] Pour en finir, Ce qui n'est pas Germain est créé pour servir.
And the Germanic People, displaying the blond hair of their ancestors, emerged to dominance in every corner of the world. Neptune and his trident serve the Anglo-Saxon, their last descendant, and the peopled deserts of young America know the strength of this heroic people. But as to the Romans, Germans, Gauls, [...] to put it briefly, those who are non German are created to serve.
Reflecting his disdain for ordinary people, Gobineau said French aristocrats like himself were the descendants of the Germanic Franks who conquered the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century AD, while common French people were the descendants of racially inferior Celtic and Mediterranean people. This was an old opinion first promoted in a tract by Count Henri de Boulainvilliers. He had argued that the Second Estate the aristocracy was of "Frankish" blood and the Third Estate the commoners were of "Gaulish" blood. Born after the French Revolution had destroyed the idealized Ancien Régime of his imagination, Gobineau felt a deep sense of pessimism regarding the future.
For him the French Revolution, having destroyed the racial basis of French greatness by overthrowing and in many cases killing the aristocracy, was the beginning of a long, irresistible process of decline and degeneration, which could only end with the utter collapse of European civilization. He felt what the French Revolution had begun the Industrial Revolution was finishing; industrialization and urbanization were a set up disaster for Europe.
Like numerous other European romantic conservatives, Gobineau looked back nostalgically at an idealized representation of the Middle Ages as an idyllic agrarian society living harmoniously in a rigid social order. He loathed advanced Paris, a city he called a "giant cesspool" full of les déracinés "the uprooted"—the criminal, impoverished, drifting men with no real home. Gobineau considered them to be the monstrous products of centuries of miscegenation complete to explode in revolutionary violence at any moment. He was an ardent opponent of democracy, which he stated was mere "mobocracy"—a system that enables the utterlymob thesay on running the state.
From November 1849 to January 1854 Gobineau was stationed at the French legation in ern as the First Secretary. During his time in Switzerland Gobineau wrote the majority of the Essai.