Jean-Baptiste Botul, the fictional but famous philosopher of the oral tradition, needs no introduction – especially not since 2010, when Bernard-Henri Lévy’s monumental mistake, which is referred to in this second book, made him even more of a household name. This little book follows in the footsteps of Botul’s previous works (The Sex life of Emmanuel Kant (1999), and Landru, précurseur du féminisme (Landru: Serial Killer and Forerunner of Feminism, 2001)...); but this time, it is signed by Frédéric Pagès. For it is the transcription of a seminar given at the Botul Conference on March 21, 2013, in which Pagès reported the results of his exploration of the archive materials found in Lairière, the town where the philosopher was born: by cross-checking various eyewitness accounts, this allowed him to reconstitute the dark chapter known as the Carcassonne affair. In June 1928, Botul, during his ephemeral career as a philosophy teacher, brought a class of boys to a bordello called Mon Caprice: not for the sake of entertainment, but as a veritable initiation, one that would connect them to the ancient tradition of Roman banquets and would stimulate ever-so-many philosophical questions about education, virility and the French Republic.

Jean-Baptiste Botul’s books are well-known and loved: The Sex Life of Emmanuel Kant (1999), Nietzsche’s Mid-Life Crisis (2004) sold almost 10,000 copies each. In this book, Frédéric Pagès’s renown increases his creation’s. A small book for a small price, to match the first Botul books and remain attractive to fans of a philosopher who has a lot to thank Bernard-Henri Levy for.