Simone Weil

Photograph from Alamy

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a Jewish-French philosopher, political activist, Christian theologian, and mystic. Her unusual philosophical writings drew upon theological/mysticist ethics in relation to radical civic politics. Weil’s leftist politics reveal themselves in her vehement critique of tyranny and fascism, her devout pacifism, and her enduring advocacy in Marxist material terms for the liberation of the working classes.

While born into a well-to-do middle-class family, Weil always expressed sympathy for working-class liberation and scorned the comforts of bourgeois life. A precocious student, Weil was proficient in ancient Greek by the age of twelve. In her adolescence, she studied at the Lycée Henri IV, attracting attention from staff and fellow students due to her outspoken radical thought and her political organisation such as advocacy in opposition to the military draft. During her time at school, she was given the nicknames ‘The Red Virgin’, ‘The Martian’, and ‘The Categorical Imperative in Skirts’. Going on to study philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Weil was classmates with socialist-feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir – though the two rarely spoke – and she graduated in 1931 first in her final exam, with Beauvoir closely ranking second.

After university, while teaching at Le Puy, Weil became involved in local political activity, supporting striking workers underpaid by the City Council. Seeking opportunities to experience first hand the sufferings of the proletariat, she left her comfortable academic life behind in 1934 and began working on the assembly lines at a Renault factory. Two years later she travelled to Spain, enlisting in a worker’s brigade against Franco’s forces, only returning home when injured. Weil’s experiences among everyday labourers and antifascist activists ‘…confirmed her growing convictions regarding the dehumanising effects of modern industrialism and war.’[1] In her posthumously published final work The Need for Roots (1949), she traces these oppressive civilisational structures back to ancient Rome, where a mechanistic regime based on brute force was established. In her view, this violent and colonialist regime was replicated by France and other European nations from the ancient period to modern times and resulted in the rise of fascism.

Weil frequently used the prism of Classics to support her leftist politics in correspondences with French politicians. She objected to French colonial policy, writing in a letter to propaganda minister Giraudoux “…and how can it be said we [the French] brought culture to the Arabs when it is them who have preserved the traditions of Greece from us through the Middle Ages?”[2] This anti-colonial/-imperial strand of her thinking wove into her pacifist praxis, in particular in her receptions of Homer’s Iliad. In 1937, she published an article in favour of peace negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler titled Let Us Not Again Begin the Trojan War. In her most famous pacifist Homeric reception, The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1939), Weil analysed the Iliad as the greatest anti-war poem in European history, claiming that it represented war’s futility for all human life in its abuses of power and violence. She expressed admiration at the text’s capacity to examine both sides of an international conflict through a shared humanity, as well as its representation of the subjugation of enslaved peoples, which she articulates as an existence of ‘living death’ under Force. Weil wrote many other short and fragmented analyses in her theological notebooks on ancient Greek philosophy and science, connecting these to Christian moral and political thought. Adopting Plato’s concept of the ‘Great Beast’ in Book VI of The Republic, Weil criticised society for its idolatry of power which, in her view, led to nationalism, warfare, and oppression.

Alongside the Iliad, Weil also engaged with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone was particularly instrumental in Weil’s political self-fashioning: she considered Antigone a Christ-like figure, whose piety and unwavering pursuit of ethics in opposition to the violence of state power embodied an aspirational model.

Due to the Nazi genocide against Jewish peoples, Weil and her family were forced to flee France to America in 1942. Despite her repeated efforts to join covert operatives parachuting back into the country to aid the French resistance, Weil was rejected on the grounds of ill health and because her obvious ethnicity would put her in extreme danger. Frustrated at this forced inaction, Weil began refusing to eat any more than those experiencing rationing in the poorest parts of France as an act of solidarity. Following this, however, her health began to rapidly decline, and she was eventually moved to a sanatorium in England. There, in 1943, Weil died from cardiac failure at the age of 34. The coroner’s report considered her death a suicide.

This profile was written by Eleanor Baker (University of St Andrews, Student CL4468)

[1] War and the Iliad, ix.

[2] War and the Iliad, x-xi.

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