Editing Arthur de Gobineau (section)

===Time in Newfoundland===
In 1859, an Anglo-French dispute over the French fishing rights on the [[French Shore]] of [[Newfoundland (island)|Newfoundland]] led to an Anglo-French commission being sent to Newfoundland to find a resolution to the dispute. Gobineau was one of the two French commissioners dispatched to Newfoundland, an experience that he later recorded in his 1861 book ''Voyage à Terre-Neuve'' ("Voyage to Newfoundland"). In 1858, the Foreign Minister Count [[Alexandre Colonna-Walewski]] had tried to send Gobineau to the French legation in Beijing. He objected that as a "civilized European" he had no wish to go to an Asian country like China.{{sfn|Wilkshire|1993|p=8}} As punishment, Walewski sent Gobineau to Newfoundland, telling him he would be fired from the Quai d'Orsay if he refused the Newfoundland assignment.{{sfn|Wilkshire|1993|p=9}}

Gobineau hated Newfoundland, writing to a friend in Paris on 26 July 1859: "This is an awful country. It is very cold, there is almost constant fog, and one sails between pieces of floating ice of enormous size."{{sfn|Wilkshire|1993|p=10}} In his time in [[St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador|St. John's]], a city largely inhabited by Irish immigrants, Gobineau deployed virtually every anti-Irish cliché in his reports to Paris. He stated the Irish of St. John's were extremely poor, undisciplined, conniving, obstreperous, dishonest, loud, violent, and usually drunk.{{sfn|Gobineau|1993|p=104}} He described several of the remote fishing settlements he visited in Utopian terms, praising them as examples of how a few hardy, tough people could make a living under very inhospitable conditions.{{sfn|Gobineau|1993|p=106}} Gobineau's praise for Newfoundland fishermen reflected his viewpoint that those who cut themselves off from society best preserve their racial purity.{{sfn|Wilkshire|1993|p=21}} Despite his normal contempt for ordinary people, he called the Newfoundland fishermen he met "the best men that I have ever seen in the world".{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|p=199}} Gobineau observed that in these remote coastal settlements, there were no policemen as there was no crime, going on to write: {{blockquote|I am not sorry to have seen once in my life a sort of Utopia. [...] A savage and hateful climate, a forbidding countryside, the choice between poverty and hard dangerous labour, no amusements, no pleasures, no money, fortune and ambition being equally impossible—and still, for all this, a cheerful outlook, a kind of domestic well-being of the most primitive kind. [...] But this is what succeeds in enabling men to make use of complete liberty and to be tolerant of one another.{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|p=199}}}}