Simone Weil
RESEARCH NETWORK
Simone Weil: Biography
Simone Weil, 1934
“She was strange; indeed, somewhat ridiculous. It was hard explaining the interest I took in her. It necessarily implied some kind of mental derangement. At least, that’s how it appeared to the friends I used to meet at the Bourse. At the time, she was the one human being who could rescue me from dejection. When she came into the bar, her frazzled, black silhouette in the doorway seemed, in this fief of luck and wealth, a pointless incarnation of disaster. Her clothes were black, badly cut, and spotted. She seemed not to see what was in front of her; she frequently bumped into tables as she walked by. Her hair (short, stiff, unkempt, hatless) stuck out like crow’s wings on either side of her face.”
These words were written by the French philosopher and surrealist Georges Bataille in his 1935 novella Blue of Noon. The description of this woman, Lazare, is cutting, striking a tremulous balance between contempt and admiration. The name Bataille gives to this moribund figure is highly suggestive, evoking the resurrection of Lazarus (Lazare in French) by Christ after four days in his tomb. The inspiration for Bataille’s Lazare was none other than the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), after their brief acquaintance as contributors to the left-wing journal La Critique Sociale. The enmity expressed by Bataille was certainly mutual. In a letter Weil wrote to the members of the Communist Democratic Circle encouraging the group to disband, she concludes her critique of Bataille, then one of its members, with the following comment: “And no doubt Bataille himself is indeed much less coherent than I indicate.”
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This anecdote is illustrative of the unique and compelling personality of Simone Weil: many more like it abound. While still a student, Simone de Beauvoir approached Weil, who by then had acquired a startling reputation for her political fervour. As de Beauvoir recounts their meeting, Weil “declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world today: the Revolution that would feed all the starving people on the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see that you’ve never gone hungry,’ she snapped.” Later as a schoolteacher, Weil implored her parents to host the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky during his visit to Paris. In December 1933, returning to stay with her parents during the holidays, the fateful encounter between the two transpired. Onlookers observed the encounter with fascination as the 24-year-old schoolteacher competently rebutted the once-leader of the Red Army. Reflecting on his evening quarrelling with Weil, Trotsky remarked upon leaving: “You can say that the Fourth International was founded in your home.”
Simone Weil was born on February 3rd 1909 to a middle-class Parisian family. As the family’s second child, Simone compared her achievements against those of her older brother André Weil, who eventually became one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and a key member of the influential Bourbaki group. In a letter written in 1942 to her close friend Father Jean-Marie Perrin, she confided to him that “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.” Although less gifted than her brother, throughout her school studies Simone astonished her teachers with her precocious mastery of mathematics, Latin and Greek – and her inability to succeed in geography and art due to a circulatory problem that caused her lifelong issues with bodily coordination.
Simone Weil with the Bourbaki Group, 1938
Simone Weil’s school studies culminated in her being transferred at 16 to the top class of the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV for her undergraduate studies. While there, she was instructed by Émile Chartier, better known by the nom-de-plume Alain. Many of Alain’s pupils later in life had highly successful careers as philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, and Simone de Beauvoir. Additionally, Alain’s lectures were secretly attended by a young Maurice Merleau-Ponty, then a student at the equally prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. The program of study in which Weil was enrolled, referred to as khâgne, prepares its students for the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which is still today France’s top university for the humanities. Weil passed the exam on her second attempt. While preparing for this exam, Weil occasionally visited the Sorbonne, where her confrontation with de Beauvoir took place. When the results for the ‘General Philosophy and Logic’ exam for the Summer of 1927 were announced, de Beauvoir was listed as having the second-highest scores; Weil came first. Despite the tremendous influence of Alain on Weil’s learning at this time, there was one important matter on which they could not agree: what Alain called the “perilous passage” of revolution.
Weil’s first encounter with revolutionary political philosophy likely occurred in the 1920s, and her pervasive references to Marx make him one of the most pronounced of all her influences. Despite this, Weil never joined any far-left organisations except as a contributor to several far-left journals, including La Révolution Prolétarienne, L’Ecole Émancipée, L’Effort and, of course, La Critique Sociale. Unlike many of her contemporaries on the radical left at the time, Weil’s unwavering commitment to liberation included a concern for the globally oppressed. In 1930, Roubaud published a report on the Yên Bái massacre in French Indochina; after reading this report, Weil never failed to take seriously France’s status as a colonial empire. Ever critical of her fellow militants, Weil spent the Summer of 1933 in Germany studying the communist movement in the factories there. From these experiences, she concluded that “despite the state of mind of the masses and the urgent danger, the Party’s Central Committee has been silent ever since the vague appeal it issued the day after Hitler was appointed chancellor. One might think it doesn’t exist.”
Simone Weil wearing the C.N.T. combat uniform, 1936
After her experiences in Germany, she was granted a year’s leave from work, during which time she sought out employment at several factories around Paris. While working in the Paris factories, she kept a notebook, now published as her ‘Factory Journal,’ the key insights from which she also converted into an article titled ‘Factory Work.’ However, she experienced substantial difficulties finding anyone willing to publish her article, only securing a place for it in 1941. She later stated that during her factory experiences she “received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” These experiences formed the empirical core of her concept of affliction, itself a central element of her later political philosophy. After her factory experiences and unable to sit idly by while struggles for liberation waged on elsewhere, in 1936 Weil joined the Spanish civil war, enlisting with the anarcho-syndicalist C.N.T. [Confederación Nacional del Trabajo] in the Durruti Column after being refused a place with the Trotskyist P.O.U.M. [Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista].
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The period of 1933-8 was one of tremendous intellectual and spiritual development for Weil. During this time she underwent three mystical experiences, with the first occurring in Portugal whilst on holiday from her factory work. There, hearing the fishermen’s wives singing a hymn in procession through the streets, “the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.” Her second mystical experience occurred during her visit to the Italian town of Assisi in 1937 where she notes: “something stronger than I compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” Her final mystical experience took place in 1938. She had suffered all her life from debilitating migraines; however, she learned that by reciting George Herbert’s poem ‘Love,’ she could transform her physical anguish into “a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words.”
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In 1939 the unimaginable happened, and war broke out again in Europe. After a mere six weeks of combat, France fell to the Nazi invasion. Because of their Jewish heritage, Weil and her family were forced to flee the country, travelling from Paris, Marseille, and Casablanca to New York. In Marseille, Gustave Thibon, a Pétainist and member of the far-right Action Française, granted Weil permission to work for him as a farmhand. Before leaving Marseilles for Casablanca, Weil bequeathed to him several of her notebooks; Thibon later edited these notebooks (in not unproblematic ways) into what is now Weil’s most famous work, Gravity and Grace. While in New York, she frequented Harlem in the hopes of better understanding the subjugation to which black Americans were being subjected. During this time she nevertheless felt compelled to return to Europe to join the war effort, eventually securing a position in 1942 with Charles De Gaulle’s Free French resistance movement in London. Despite her tenacious requests to be deployed in France, she was consigned to a desk job working as a headline analyst for the group.
The menial work that the Free French assigned her did not prevent her from writing some of her most rigorous texts, including a book which she described as her “second magnum opus” (the first being her earlier Reflections concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression from 1934). In French, this book was titled L’Enracinement; in English, it is published as The Need for Roots. L’Enracinement explores the cultural origins of France’s defeat during the Nazi invasion and describes a program for the rejuvenation of France once liberated from occupation. It remains unknown whether, had she lived to see the end of the war, she would have succeeded in convincing De Gaulle to adopt her policies.
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Finally, enfeebled by a lifetime of migraines, physical injuries, and other illnesses, and refusing to eat any more than prisoners of war in Germany, on August 24th 1943 in an Ashford sanatorium, Weil’s remarkable life came to a close.
Biography by Kenneth Novis
Simone Weil's gravestone in the New Cemetery (Ashford, Kent)