The philosopher who took factory jobs to understand what work does to people
Simone Weil beat Simone de Beauvoir in a philosophy exam, then left the classroom to spend a year on assembly lines at Alstom and Renault. She died at 34 in England, having eaten little in solidarity with occupied France, and most of her writing only found readers after her death.
Weil was born in Paris on 3 February 1909 to a comfortable Alsatian Jewish family; her father Bernard was a doctor and her elder brother André became a celebrated mathematician. Appendicitis at six months left her frail for life. The siblings taught themselves Ancient Greek, using it as a secret language, and she later learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita. Her empathy showed early: at six she gave away her sugar and chocolate for soldiers at the front, and at ten she marched with strikers and called herself a Bolshevik.
At the Lycée Henri IV she studied under the philosopher known as Alain, who nicknamed her the Martian; classmates called her the categorical imperative in skirts. She came top in the general philosophy and logic certificate, with Beauvoir second, and in 1931 finished a thesis on Descartes under Léon Brunschvicg. When Beauvoir said life was about finding meaning, Weil retorted that it was plain she had never gone hungry.
Teaching in Le Puy, she backed underpaid council workers until their wages rose, and she travelled weekly to Saint-Étienne to teach literature to labourers. Convinced that philosophy must be lived, she worked incognito in factories and developed her idea of affliction, the machine-like drudgery that leaves no room to imagine rebellion. She grew critical of Marxism, warning that bureaucratic elites could oppress as harshly as capitalists, and Trotsky answered her articles with personal attacks. After visiting Germany in 1932 she judged its communists no match for the fascists, and from 1933 she helped those fleeing Hitler.
Despite her pacifism she went to Spain in 1936 and joined an anarchist unit of the Durruti Column, after failing to persuade Julián Gorkin to send her on a covert rescue mission. Drawn increasingly to the ascetic, egalitarian side of Christianity and to mysticism, she was in Britain serving de Gaulle's exiled Free French government when her heart gave out in 1943. Her books became widely known in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: Simone Weil
