A French nobleman whose race theories influenced the Nazis. Gobineau believed that some races were superior to others the tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic type was the most superior; the brown Negroid type was the least.
Composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) was attracted by Gobineau’s theories; they were also seized on and developed by his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamber-Lain, who turned them towards German nationalism and anti-Semitism in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). During the next half-century, these ideas and distortions of these ideas became the ideology of the Nazi party, culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.