Simone Weil

Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Strikingly beautiful and intellectually precocious, she was reading the evening paper aloud to her family at age 5, quoting Jean Racine at 6, and mastered classical Greek and several modern languages by her early teens. She developed her social awareness during World War I, refusing to eat sugar because French soldiers at the front had none. In 1936, Weil joined an anarchist unit near Zaragoza, Spain, but after an accident, she went to Portugal to recover. There, she experienced mystical visions and adopted a theology close to Roman Catholicism, despite her Jewish heritage. During the German occupation of Paris in WWII, Weil moved to southern France, working as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the U.S. in 1942, then moved to London to work with the French Resistance. Weil refused to eat more than the official ration to identify with her compatriots, leading to malnutrition and tuberculosis. She died at age 34 after a few months in a sanatorium. Her writings, collected posthumously, cover social justice, her religious life, and critiques of modern industrial society and totalitarianism. This biography offers an engaging introduction to her life, illustrating her profound influence on modern social thought.