Simone Weil

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, political activist and labourer who lived from 1909 to 1943. Born in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family, she became a teacher after her formal education and taught intermittently through the 1930s, taking breaks for poor health and to devote herself to political activism; she assisted the trade union movement, sided with the anarchist Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spent a year working as a labourer, mostly in car factories, to better understand the working class. She was drawn to the ascetic, egalitarian elements of Christianity and became increasingly religious and inclined toward mysticism as her life progressed. She died of heart failure in 1943 while working for the Free French government in exile in Britain; her uncompromising personal ethics, including restricting her own food intake in solidarity with the inhabitants of Nazi-occupied France, may have contributed to her death. Most of her writing did not attract much attention until after her death, when it became famous in continental Europe and the English-speaking world during the 1950s and 1960s, and her philosophical and theological thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across politics, society, feminism, science, education and classics.