Gobineau, the Would-be Orientalist

AbstractThe poet, traveller, Arabist and campaigning anti-imperialist Wilfrid Blunt, who visited Gobineau in 1871, described him in his diary as follows: “Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark rather prominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerky gait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, but distrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a bad listener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man of taste, a man of the world”.1On December 16 1904, Marcel Proust wrote to an old friend from schooldays, “Me voici gobinien. Je ne pense qu’à lui”.2That old friend was Robert Dreyfus, the brother of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, and, together with Proust, one of the leading campaigners for Alfred's release from Devil's Island. (Alfred was only fully exonerated in 1906.) Proust, of course, skilfully worked the scandals and passions of the Dreyfus Affair into his great sequence of novels,À la recherche du temps perdu. As for Robert, he was to publish his Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust in 1926. But he had also published an admiring monograph entitledLa vie et prophéties du Comte de Gobineauin 1909. All this may suggest that, though Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) was a racist, he may not have been a conventional one.