system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
why were most of Nietzsche followers/readers leftist (deleuze, camus, Sartre etc) even though his philosophy is one of the most radically anti-egalitarian, anti democratic, anti working class etc?
gpt
In the French context, Nietzsche served as a useful foil against the prevalence of Hegel's philosophy: where Hegel was understood as totalizing, subsuming, striving for the absolute, logicist, etc etc, Nietzsche stood for the fragmentary, the perspectival, the sensuous, and the playful. In the post-war period, the spectre of totalitarianism and the holocaust meant people were looking for a way out from systems of dominance, of which Hegel's was seen as emblematic. Incidentally this was the case not only among the French, but the Germans too (re: the Frankfurt school).

Basically, Nietzsche was seen as a kind of escape. His iconoclasm was apposite for a time in which everything seemed to be up in the air: it was a time of surrealism, avant-garde art, experiments with form, and irony - and Nietzsche seemed to fit the bill. After the horror of two world wars, the ideas like "God is dead" would have seemed pretty resonant! His 'proto-existentialism' also seemed to follow nicely from the philosophers who were de jour at the time: Heidegger (who wrote two influential volumes on Nietzsche), Sartre, Jaspers, etc, all found in Nietzsche resources to draw on for their own work, especially with respect to the 'anti-metaphysical' bent that Nietzsche exhibited.

Basically, tendencies in Nietzsche - tendencies that ran alongside his anti-egalitarianism, which was definitely one of them - were tapped into, and powerfully enough that his aristocratic sympathies could either be creatively appropriated or simply ignored.