In 1855, French count Arthur de Gobineau published his infamous work "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races". Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the claims of the Third Estate, Gobineau divides the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that "history springs only from contact with the white races." Among the white races, he distinguishes the Aryan race as the pinnacle of human development, the basis of all European aristocracies. However, inevitable miscegenation led to the "downfall of civilizations". The politically legitimist Gobineau was an enemy of democracy as much as he was an enemy of miscegenation.