Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific racist theory and "racial demography" and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race. Known to his contemporaries as a novelist, diplomat and travel writer, he was an elitist who, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In it he claimed aristocrats were superior to commoners and they possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races—Alpines and Mediterraneans.