Editing Arthur de Gobineau (section)

===Embittered royalist===
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.{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|pp=42–43}} His 1847 novel ''Ternove'' was the first time Gobineau linked class with race, writing "Monsieur de Marvejols would think of himself, and of all members of the nobility, as of a race apart, of a superior essence, and he believed it criminal to sully this by mixture with plebeian blood."{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|pp=44–45}} The novel, set 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.{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|p=44}}

Gobineau was horrified by the [[Revolution of 1848]] and disgusted by what he saw as the supine reaction of the European upper classes to the revolutionary challenge. Writing in the spring of 1848 about the news from Germany he noted: "Things are going pretty badly ... I do 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 nearly barbarous. There is pillage, and burning, and massacre—and we are only at the beginning."{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|pp=60–61}}

As a Legitimist, Gobineau disliked the [[House of Bonaparte]] and was displeased when [[Napoleon III|Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte]] was elected president of the republic in 1848.{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|p=61}} However, he came to support Bonaparte as the best man to preserve order, and in 1849, when Tocqueville became Foreign Minister, his friend Gobineau became his ''[[chef de cabinet]]''.{{sfn|Biddiss|1970|p=62}}