Jean-Baptiste Botul, a Forgotten Nietzschean from France
Jean-Baptiste Botul, a Forgotten Nietzschean from France
Time and again, our blog is dedicated to overlooked figures from the Nietzscheverse. The Leipzig Anglist Elmar Schenkel went deep into the archives for us in order to introduce you to an almost unknown figure of French-language Nietzsche reception: the “taxi philosopher” Jean-Baptiste Botul, who lived from 1896 to 1947 and not only came into contact with numerous prominent figures of his time on his trips through Paris, but developed also, in conversations with them, his very own Nietzsche interpretation, which, due to its subversive explosive power, has been stored in the poison cabinet by the mainstream of Nietzsche research to the present day. If Nietzsche was, in his own words, “dynamite,” then Botul is a rocket of the Force de frappe, still awaiting detonation — a stroke of luck?
Before AI, i.e. artic intelligence, starts writing new texts by Nietzsche (like the psychics and spiritists who continued the works of Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad, or Schubert's Unfinished finalized) or even invent further exegetes (from Guatemala, Puerto Rico or the Vatican), it is time to rescue and examine the last castaways in the analog world. In other words, there are still a number of completely lost Nietzsche commentators who have worked intensively on Nietzsche away from the mainstream, often not only by studying him but also by studying him lived have. If you look at France, you should not recite the same mantras of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze, but also consider Jacques Bouveresse (1940-2021), who played Nietzsche against Foucault as an anti-relativist and played Nietzsche against Foucault in his last book (Les foudres de Nietzsche1), scourging the delusion of the French Nietzsche followers.
I. A Life between Tango and Taxi
Jean-Baptiste Botul is also one of these French Nietzsche experts. Botul shared his birthday, August 15, 1896, with Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), an Indian politician, mystic and philosopher who repeatedly referred to Nietzsche, and the Day of Indian Independence 49 years later. There is only sparse information about his parents: The father ran a lottery shop on the Loire, the mother sewed uniforms for the military. One can only speculate about Jean-Baptiste's early years. One of his followers, the Irish philosopher Frederick de Selby, appears to have used the art of speculation in his rather thin biography of Botul, making a distinction between euphoria and outright lies. It was published in 1953 under the title Biographical Extravagancies. The Life of J.-B. Botul and can only be viewed in special libraries. (The German interlibrary loan service that I wanted to use unfortunately completely failed.) Since this work appears to be quite unreliable, that might not be a bad thing.
Let us therefore stick to the undeniable facts that Frédéric Pagès strings together in his edition (2004) of Botul's main work: In 1894, Botul met the founder of the scouting movement, the British cavalry officer Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941), but it was not founded until 1907. So there should be in his Memories of an eclectique (1934) have postponed the memory somewhat. He certainly wanted to highlight similarities between himself and Baden-Powell: searching for clues, observing wild animals in the jungle, moral principles, idealistic activism. The first engagement with Marthe Betenfeld failed. In 1914, Botul evaded mobilization by fleeing to Argentina. At the same time, the kindred boy Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) moved from Buenos Aires to Switzerland to learn the language of Heine and Schopenhauer. Meanwhile, Botul is dedicating himself intensively to tango and will soon be offering courses in this discipline. In particular, he is now a taxi driver. A first philosophical attempt is taxi analysis, which we only know combines tracking (worthy of Holmes) with logical-analytical thinking (Bouveresse says hello!). But he doesn't yet leave any traces himself. He now becomes a representative of the French government on a Mexican atoll — unknown why there and anyway. From 1919, correspondence with the serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, the so-called “Bluebeard from Gambais,” presumably out of an interest similar to Musil's in his Man Without Qualities harbored opposite Moosbrugger.
Botul begins a proper study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Pagès writes of a brief relationship with the noble Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), “Freud's Princess” and girlfriend of Rilke, as well as author of a three-volume analysis by Edgar Allan Poe. The same, and this is important now, from a brief liaison with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who belonged to the same circle around Freud. This can be dated to 1923, but it was only around 1930 that an erotic correspondence can be found, hitherto unedited, as the legal issues in this delicate matter remain unresolved. The brief affair with Simone de Beauvoir, as she suggests to Pagès, seems doubtful to me. Botul had the tendency to interpret taxi rides with celebrities as friendship or even as an affair.
A visit to Röcken — Nietzsche's birthplace and burial ground — appears to have taken place in the 1930s. A letter about this to Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche is preserved in the Botul archive, which is located in the castle of the Baron de La Cuisse-Este-Maison, Indre-Loire. In this letter, he writes (without date) about his planned visit to “Recken.” There is no sign of this in the guest books or similar documents in skirts or sützen. But it is possible that the horse on the goat stable at the rectory in Röcken was drawn with brown lines by him, as it is signed with JBB. The Nietzsche-Verein Röcken has the firm intention of having the picture dated exactly once. A Leipzig sepulchral researcher is in the starting blocks. In any case, this strange image has the potential to become a magnet for tourism in the Lützen area in addition to the graves of Gustav Adolf and Nietzsche.
Botul spent the last decade until his death in 1947 (also on August 15) as a taxi driver in Paris. He claims to have driven Stefan Zweig once.
II. The Nietzsche Pendulum
Let us turn to his Nietzsche studies, which, however, appear less academic, but they are closer to Nietzsche than those of established philosophers because they bring Nietzsche into life or describe him in an experience of life. The correspondence with psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé led to this. In the Botul Archive, we learn more, even though the archive manager there, the named Baron, had a somewhat opaque relationship with Botul and does not want to make the letters available to the public because they are banned from publishing until 2044. His suggestions, however, give an idea of the dimensions of thinking of “JBB,” as he always abbreviates it.
According to this, Botul has in his Memoirs of a Forgetful (published posthumously, Les Éditions de la Quinzaine, Paris 2023, in which his works were published in their entirety, by the way) wrote about a taxi ride that changed his life. One evening, it is February 6, 1937, in front of the Paris Opera House, the streets shining with rain, a customer gets into a taxi, a young lady who, when asked “Where? “only “Cours Désir” stated what he probably misunderstood, because he was currently working intensively on psychoanalysis (he also called it “taxi analysis”). The young lady is a student at a strict Catholic institute on Rue de Rennes, which bears this very associative name.
What exactly happened that night remains in the shadow of history. In any case, she only arrived home early in the morning, causing her parents' anger. She did not want to give any information. Botul stated that Daemon of Noon I forced him to talk to the young woman about Nietzsche all night, i.e.: He saw in the lady an embodiment of the recently deceased Lou Andreas-Salomé, a demon with whom he had so much in common. As a result of this suspicious trip, the dreaded “taxi court” was convened, and numerous taxi drivers also gathered to interrogate Botul. Botul presented his understanding of German philosophy to this committee for about twelve hours. Here he called it Nietzsche's “taxography” for the first time, which was to become the title of his seven-volume major work. The success among his colleagues was that during his nine-hour presentation, most of them had left the hall, or the chairman threatened him that there would soon be a fight if he did not immediately leave this German philosopher. Botul hurried home and began to write down his work as if in a trance.
He described the conversations with taxi customers as “taxography,” which, while accepting many detours, he unerringly engaged in thoughts about Nietzsche. After arrival, customers were unable to complain about the fare because they had experienced a certain mental uplift; some compared it to a near-death experience. But let us be careful because many did not want to provide any information. Even as the “botulism” was already becoming a phrase in the Latin Quarter, no one wanted to admit that they had received their survey in this taxi. In any case, “elevation” is a correct word, because, as from taxography III (§ 8), Botul always developed his thoughts on Nietzsche in terms of two dualities: Up vs. Down and Easy vs. Heavy; Exaltation and Humiliation, Aggravation and Relief. A pendulum law. Botul wanted to wrest the hammer from Nietzsche and equip him with a shovel instead. While the hammer destroys or nails down, the shovel is mobile; it is also an instrument of archaeology (here first echoes of Foucault, who unfortunately discovered Botul too late), a child's tool and a symbol of construction. Your movement is versatile. You can excavate thoughts, yes, even as Nietzsche knew, poems that are also trees.2 This is how Botul named him Elevateur de la poésie, which, by the way, was supposed to come as a “poem lifter” in the German translation, but unfortunately became “weightlifter” due to a typographical error. Not a good omen for German reception. The shovel, however, combines the top and bottom as well as the light and the heavy, a quality that Botul thought of. Time was neither cyclical nor linear for him, but he saw with Nietzsche in time a sphere on which the lines from above and below, from East and West intersected without interruption. Superhumans can arise at any of these intersections. They are not the product of breeding or the future, but are the result of pure chance. According to JBB, this is what Nietzsche meant with the preposition “on the way to the superman.”3.
Botul often brought taxi customers into his car, his “Frédéric Mobile”, with the help of a calendar and detailed observations of their steps through Paris. Some traces of them could be reconstructed in his writings. It should be noted that he hated quotation marks above all else. In taxography IV, § 37, we find a text in which every word is provided with quotation marks — in retrospect an early parody of postmodernism, which was intended to put its “Nietzsche” on the sign.
A trace may be mentioned as an example. He was a great admirer of composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) and was also able to steer him into his taxi one day, in front of the famous cabaret, of course Le Chat noir. The gymnopedist quickly got into the old, well-known taxi. Although he had never read it, he liked to be engaged in a conversation about Nietzsche's pendulum thinking. In the notes of Satie's friend Contamine de Latour (1867-1926), we read about Satie's difficulties with music. Botul seems to have adopted the text with minor modifications:
He [Botul writes about himself in the memoirs always in the third person, sometimes singular, sometimes plural; just Nietzschean] created a personal philosophy. His philosophical education was very incomplete, so he gathered together the elements he had mastered and made a special recipe from them, declared the rest to be non-existent and even harmful to a good philosophical way of thinking. He was in the situation of a person who only knew thirteen letters of the alphabet and decided to create a new philosophy with this material instead of admitting his lack of skill.
His motto: In any moment, you can be a superman. But this is only possible with the complete map of Paris in mind. He was a great admirer of the French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), who unfortunately died early. His dream would have been to have driven him in a taxi and then to have been drawn by him as a literary portrait. The trip with Stefan Zweig was too short for such a result. He was able to bring the legendary Pierre Menard to a Spanish archive, where he was currently carrying out his monumental studies on the geology of La Mancha.
In his later years, Botul turned to Asian thought without giving up Nietzsche. “Nietzsche would have done that too,” he used to say, “unless he would have become a Jesuit, maybe even a taxi driver if his eyes had allowed it.” One of his last words was: “It's a shame that the term 'Zen. ' ”
May there finally be a renaissance, also here in the German-speaking world. After all, Bernard-Henri Levy has his Kant critique with the help of Botul's brilliant analyses of Kantian sex life (La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant, ed. F. Pagès, posthumously 1999).
Unfortunately, flat spirits keep trying their hand at JBB, this mountain range of a thinker, and, up to this day in 2026, often with the accusation of having led a dubious existence that Nietzsche research did not advance, but did not advance at all: on the contrary.
Elmar Schenkel, Anglist and author, read Nietzsche at the age of 16 in his Catholic village in Westphalia. As a German teacher in France, he became aware of the importance of Nietzsche. Member of the board of the Nietzsche-Verein Röcken since 2015. Publications about Nietzsche: 101 letters to Friedrich Nietzsche about his 175th birthday (Edited by Fayçal Hamouda); Ed.: Nietzsche: The happy science (Kröner Verlag 2023); as author: True stories about Friedrich Nietzsche (Tauchaer Verlag 2024) and Nietzsche globally. Around the World in 80 Supermen (Kröner 2025).
Article Image
Undated portrait of Botul, probably created around 1905, which is attributed to the young Pablo Picasso, but could possibly also be by Paul Klee. It is the only surviving authentic pictorial representation of Botul, who was hostile to photography and had a strict aversion to painters. Used with permission from Archive Botul, Inv. -No 13.
Literature
Botul, Jean-Baptiste: taxography I-VII. Paris: Editions naufrages 2025.
Bouveresse, Jacques: Les foudres de Nietzsche et l'aveuglement des disciples. Marseille: Hors d'atteinte 2021.
From Selby, Frederick: Biographical Extravagancies. The Life of J.-B. Botul. Dublin: Dalkey Publishers 1953.
Pages, Frederic: Nietzsche et le Demon de Midi. Paris: Editions Mille et Une Nuit. 2004.
Wehmeyer, Grete: Erik Satie. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1998.
Footnotes
1: Editor's note: The title of this untranslated work is ambiguous; it can be translated both literally as “Nietzsche's Lightning” and translated as “Nietzsche's Wrath.”
2: “And indeed! Where such trees stand next to each other, there are Blissful islands! But one day I want to dig them and set everyone alone: that they learn loneliness and defiance and caution” (So Zarathustra spoke, From the blissful islands).
