Simone Weil

Simone Weil was born on February 3, 1909, in Paris, into a prosperous, secular Jewish family ^[1]. Her father, Bernard Weil, was a physician; her mother, Selma, managed the household with formidable energy and devoted herself to the education of her two children. Simone's older brother, André Weil, became one of the great mathematicians of the century and a founder of the Bourbaki group, and his early brilliance shaped her childhood in a specific way: measuring herself against him, she suffered agonies of self doubt about her own intelligence, an episode she later described as a crisis that ended only when she decided that any person could reach truth through sustained desire and attention ^[2].

Her schooling was exceptional. She studied under the philosopher Émile Chartier, known as Alain, at the Lycée Henri IV, and he recognized her as a mind of unusual force ^[1]. In 1928 she entered the École Normale Supérieure, the elite training ground of French intellectuals, placing first in the entrance examination in philosophy; Simone de Beauvoir, who took the same examination cycle, placed behind her ^[3]. Beauvoir later recalled meeting Weil in the courtyard of the Sorbonne and being struck by her reputation for both intelligence and radical compassion, writing that Weil had wept on hearing news of famine in China ^[3].

Even as a student Weil pushed political commitment further than her peers. She supported striking workers, gave away much of her allowance, and refused small comforts as a matter of principle. Chronic ill health, including severe migraines that would afflict her for the rest of her life, began in these years and never released her ^[2].

After passing the agrégation in philosophy in 1931, Weil took up posts as a secondary school philosophy teacher, first at the girls' lycée in Le Puy and later in Auxerre, Roanne, Bourges, and Saint Quentin ^[1]. She was, by most accounts, a demanding and unconventional teacher, and her activities outside the classroom repeatedly alarmed her superiors. In Le Puy she marched with unemployed workers, taught free classes for laborers, and wrote for syndicalist journals, which brought threats of dismissal and a transfer ^[2].

The defining experiment of her early career came in 1934 and 1935, when she took leave from teaching to work as an unskilled laborer in Paris factories, including a spell at the Renault works ^[1]. The point was not journalism. Weil believed that a philosopher who wrote about oppression without experiencing it wrote in ignorance, so she operated presses and assembly machinery for months despite her physical frailty. The experience broke something in her. She recorded in her factory journal that the relentless pace, the humiliation, and the exhaustion stamped her with what she called the mark of a slave, and the encounter with affliction, her term for suffering that crushes the soul as well as the body, became a permanent axis of her thought ^[4].

Out of this period came one of her most substantial early works, the long essay published in English as Oppression and Liberty, in which she analyzed why revolutions tend to replace one form of oppression with another and argued that the structure of modern work itself, not merely ownership, degrades the worker ^[4]. The essay included a sharp critique of Marxism from within the left, unusual for a French intellectual of the 1930s.

In August 1936 Weil crossed into Spain to join the anarchist Durruti column on the Aragon front during the Spanish Civil War, despite her pacifist leanings and her near total inability to handle a rifle ^[1]. Her service was brief. Within weeks she stepped into a pot of boiling oil at a field kitchen, badly burning her leg, and her parents, who had followed her to Spain, brought her back to France for treatment ^[2]. The episode has an almost comic surface, but what she witnessed there was not comic: she was appalled by casual killings carried out by her own side, and she later wrote to the novelist Georges Bernanos that once a certain contempt for human life takes hold, ideology offers no protection against atrocity ^[5].

Between 1935 and 1938 Weil passed through three experiences she later described as decisive contacts with Christianity. In a Portuguese fishing village she watched a procession of women singing ancient hymns and felt that Christianity was above all the religion of slaves. At Assisi in 1937, in the chapel where Francis had prayed, she felt compelled for the first time in her life to kneel. Then, during Holy Week of 1938 at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, while following the Gregorian chant through violent headaches, she had an experience she described as the love of Christ taking possession of her ^[6].

She never accepted baptism. Weil remained deliberately at the threshold of the Catholic Church, arguing in letters to the Dominican priest Joseph Marie Perrin that God wanted her outside, in solidarity with everything the Church excluded, and that intellectual honesty forbade her to sign away her freedom of thought ^[6]. This position, faith without membership, is among the most discussed Simone Weil facts and gives her religious writing its distinctive tension.

Weil's reputation rests on work that was almost entirely unpublished when she died. Her notebooks, essays, and letters were edited posthumously into the books by which she is known: Gravity and Grace (1947), assembled by Gustave Thibon from notebook entries; Waiting for God (1950), gathered by Father Perrin from letters and essays; The Need for Roots (1949), her final long work; and the multivolume notebooks ^[7]. Albert Camus, who called her one of the essential spirits of the age, championed her writings at the publishing house Gallimard and saw several volumes into print ^[7].

Among her single essays, one classic stands out. The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, written in 1939 and published in Marseille in 1940 and 1941 under the anagrammatic pseudonym Émile Novis, reads Homer's epic as a study of how force turns human beings into things, both those it kills and those who wield it ^[8]. Written as Europe collapsed into war, the essay became one of the most admired pieces of twentieth century criticism and is still widely taught.

Her central philosophical contribution concerns attention. For Weil, attention is not effortful concentration but a suspension of the self, a waiting that makes room for truth, for other people, and for God; she argued in a famous essay on school studies that even geometry exercises train the capacity for prayer ^[6]. Paired with this is her analysis of affliction and her idea of decreation, the unmaking of the ego so that love can pass through a person unobstructed. These concepts, along with her insistence in The Need for Roots that human beings have obligations before they have rights and that the need for roots is the most ignored need of the soul, form the core of Simone Weil achievements as a thinker ^[9].

Weil never married and, by her own account and that of her biographers, organized her existence around thought, work, and an austere ethic of sharing the conditions of the worst off ^[2]. During periods of unemployment among workers she restricted her own food; while teaching, she gave away much of her salary. Friends and family found her stubbornness both maddening and magnetic. Her close friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, a fellow philosopher, recorded a person of dry humor, awkward gestures, chain smoking, and total indifference to dress and comfort ^[2].

Her relationship with her Jewish origins remains the most contested area of her life. Raised without religious instruction, she identified with Greek and Christian sources and wrote harshly about the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel, judgments that later readers, including scholars sympathetic to her, have criticized as unjust and as a painful blind spot in a woman who otherwise sided with the persecuted ^[10]. Under the Vichy regime's antisemitic statutes she was herself barred from teaching, an exclusion she protested in a sardonic letter to the Minister of Education ^[2].

Her health was permanently fragile. The migraines that began in adolescence never left her, and her habits of overwork and undereating wore down a constitution that was never strong. Those who knew her generally agree that her asceticism was not performance but the literal application of her belief that one should not possess more than the unluckiest ^[2].

When German forces occupied Paris in June 1940, Weil left the city with her parents and eventually settled in Marseille, in the unoccupied zone. There she wrote prolifically, worked in the grape harvest on Gustave Thibon's farm in the Ardèche, met Father Perrin, and contributed to the resistance minded journal Cahiers du Sud ^[1]. In May 1942 she reluctantly sailed with her parents to New York, agreeing to leave France only because she hoped America would be a stepping stone to joining the fight ^[2].

New York felt like exile. Within months she secured passage to England, arriving in Liverpool in late 1942, and took a post in London as an editor and analyst for the Free French organization of Charles de Gaulle ^[1]. She drafted reports on the moral reconstruction of postwar France, and out of this commission grew The Need for Roots. She also pressed a plan to parachute nurses onto front lines and repeatedly requested a mission into occupied France; her superiors refused, judging the schemes impractical and her appearance too conspicuous ^[2].

Her body gave out before the war ended. In April 1943 she was found collapsed in her room and diagnosed with tuberculosis. In keeping with her lifelong practice, she refused to eat more than she believed the rations allowed to people in occupied France, which complicated her treatment. Moved to the Grosvenor Sanatorium at Ashford in Kent, she died on August 24, 1943, at the age of thirty four. The coroner recorded cardiac failure brought on by tuberculosis and self starvation, a verdict that has been debated ever since, since friends insisted her refusal of food was solidarity and incapacity rather than suicide ^[1]. She was buried in Ashford's Bybrook Cemetery.

Any Simone Weil biography must reckon with the strange shape of her afterlife: a writer barely published at her death became, within a decade, a figure read across Europe and America. Camus visited her mother's apartment on the Rue Auguste Comte before traveling to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize, and he edited her works for Gallimard's Espoir series ^[7]. T. S. Eliot, prefacing the English edition of The Need for Roots in 1952, told readers they were encountering a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints ^[9].

Her influence cuts across disciplines and confessions. Pope Paul VI reportedly named her among the writers who most influenced him; philosophers including Iris Murdoch drew on her account of attention for their own moral philosophy; and writers as different as Czesław Miłosz, Flannery O'Connor, and Susan Sontag wrestled with her example in essays ^[10]. Political theorists return to her critique of parties and her obligations first account of justice, while historians of religion study her as a mystic who refused institutional shelter.

Interest has not faded. Major biographies by Simone Pétrement (1973) and later scholars, a steady stream of academic studies, and new editions of her notebooks keep her in print in many languages ^[2]. Her collected works have been published in France in a multivolume scholarly edition by Gallimard. For readers searching out Simone Weil facts today, the essentials remain what they were: a short life of thirty four years, a few thousand pages of posthumous prose, and a standard of intellectual and moral seriousness that few writers in any century have matched.