Simone Weil’s Biography
SIMONE WEIL Paris 1909 – Ashford, England 1943
She was born in Paris in 1909 from a Jewishfamily.She was student in the Normal School andteacher of philosophy in various highschools. Alain, her teacher of philosophy in the Superior Normal School was the Socrates of her thought and nicknamed her “the Martian” saying: “Simone doesn’t have anything of us, she judges us all in a sovereign way…she always had to issue orders, to involve you in demonstrations, to spur you to put your signatures, to send people around with some leaflets… ” Militant of the extreme revolutionary left, even though she didn’t join the Party, on the contrary,she was always against the Marxism in his rulesand theories, in 1934, pushed by the stronginternal demand to directly know the worse
conditions of life of the workers, she truncated the profession and the purely theoretical studies towork as worker in the Renault factory in Paris. Taken ill with pleurisy, she had to leave the factory beginning a crucial period of intimate thought.
In 1936 she participated as republican volunteer to the civil spanishwar enlisting herself in the anarchic lines of the famous Column Durruti, also accepting the services in the kitchen; but subsequently to a serious burn to a foot had to reenterin France. In 1937 the mystical turn, that is translated in afaith lived with great intensity, but she didn’t enterthe Catholic Church and, just on the last daysof herlife, she waschristenedbya friend Excluded by the teaching because of the racial laws during the regime of Vichy, she was a farmer up to 1942, when she sheltered with the family in the United States where she was very close to the poor men of Harlem.She strongly preserved, up to the end, a political appointment so much to ask to be engaged in actions of sabotage against Hitler Shortly after, however, recalled by the appointment against the totalitarianism, she returned in Europe and, from London too, she worked in “France Libre”; but in 1943 she died (and she was only 34 years) in the sanatorium of Ashford in England.