Simone Weil

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French thinker, laborer, mystic, and political activist. Though she died young, her ideas on religion, politics, and spirituality still carry weight in modern philosophy. Born in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family, her older brother André became a famous mathematician. After finishing her schooling, Weil worked as a teacher, though she took frequent breaks in the 1930s due to poor health and to focus on activism. She supported the trade union movement and sided with the anarchist Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War. For a year, she labored in car factories to understand the working class firsthand. Weil was drawn to Christianity’s ascetic and egalitarian aspects, growing more religious and mystical over time. She died of heart failure in 1943 while working for the Free French government in exile in Britain. Her strict personal ethics may have contributed to her death—she limited her food intake out of solidarity with those in Nazi-occupied France. Weil wrote constantly, but most of her work gained attention only after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her writings became famous across continental Europe and the English-speaking world. Scholars continue to study her philosophy and theology across many fields, including politics, society, feminism, science, education, and classics. Weil was born in her parents’ Paris apartment on 3 February 1909. Her father, Bernard Weil, was a doctor from an agnostic Alsatian Jewish family who moved to Paris after Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother, Salomea “Selma” Reinherz, was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium. The family name Weil came about when many Levis changed their names by anagram during the Napoleonic era. Weil was healthy for her first six months, then suffered a severe appendicitis attack; afterward, she struggled with poor health for life. Her parents were fairly wealthy and raised their children in a caring, supportive home. She was the younger child; her brother André, a mathematician, remained close to her. Weil was upset when her father was drafted and away for years during World War I. Scholars like Eva Fogelman and Robert Coles suggest this may have fueled her strong altruism. As a child, she sent her own sugar and chocolate to soldiers at the front. At age ten, she joined striking workers marching below her apartment, singing “L’Internationale.” While on vacation with her family, she learned the workers’ wages and encouraged them to unionize. From childhood, Weil was obsessed with cleanliness. Later in life, she sometimes spoke of her own “disgustingness” and thought others saw her that way, even though she was considered very attractive in her youth. She was generally very affectionate but almost always avoided physical contact, even with female friends. Her mother said Weil much preferred boys to girls and always tried to teach her what she saw as masculine virtues. According to her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early on that she needed to adopt masculine qualities and forgo romantic love to fully pursue her goal of improving conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teens, she hid her “fragile beauty” by dressing in men’s clothes, rarely using makeup. Her parents called her “our son number two” at her request; as a student, she used masculine French participles in letters and signed her name as “Simon.”

Weil was a precocious student, fluent in Ancient Greek by age twelve—she and André taught themselves the language to speak privately from their parents. She later learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita in its original form. As a teenager, she studied at the Lycée Henri IV under her admired teacher Émile Chartier, known as “Alain.”

At the Lycée Henri IV, Weil drew attention for her radical views and actions, like organizing against the military draft. She was called the “Red Virgin” and even “The Martian” by her mentor. She gained a reputation for strict ethics; classmates called her the “categorical imperative in skirts.” School officials were outraged by her indifference to clothing, her refusal to follow traditions, and her ignoring a rule against women smoking with male students—for which she was suspended. At ENS, Weil briefly met Simone de Beauvoir. When Weil said that “one thing alone mattered in the world today: the revolution that would feed all people on earth,” Beauvoir replied that life’s point was meaning, not happiness.