Simone Weil

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, political activist, and Christian mystic whose intense, ascetic life produced a body of writing that has fascinated theologians, leftists, and literary critics ever since. Born on February 3, 1909, in Paris to an agnostic Alsatian Jewish family, she was the younger sister of mathematician André Weil. From childhood she identified with the suffering of the poor; at age six she refused sugar in solidarity with French soldiers at the front.

A brilliant student at the École Normale Supérieure, she ranked first in the agrégation in philosophy in 1931, with Simone de Beauvoir placing second. She taught philosophy in provincial lycées while organizing for unemployed workers and writing for syndicalist journals. To understand industrial labor she spent the year 1934 to 1935 working on a Renault assembly line, an experience she described as one of slavery.

In 1936 she joined the anarchist Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War but was sent home after burning her leg in a cooking fire. A series of mystical experiences from 1937 onward drew her toward a Catholicism she ultimately refused to enter through baptism, preferring to remain on the threshold. Her notebooks, posthumously edited, explored attention, affliction, and the absence of God.

Fleeing Vichy France in 1942, she reached London via New York and worked for the Free French. Refusing to eat more than the rations of her compatriots in occupied France, she collapsed and died of cardiac failure complicated by tuberculosis at Ashford, Kent, on August 24, 1943, aged thirty-four.

The name Simone is the French feminine form of Simon, from the Hebrew Shimon, meaning he has heard. She bore the feminine form.