Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was a French aristocrat, diplomat, and writer whose Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1853–1855) became the nineteenth century's most systematic statement of racial hierarchy theory.
In the vault, he matters as the intellectual adversary that made Anténor Firmin's intervention necessary and as one of the architects of the scientific-racism framework that Haitian thinkers from baron-de-vastey onward were forced to a...