French · 1909–1943
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist whose short life was defined by an unusual insistence on living out her ideas. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure, she taught philosophy while working factory shifts and fighting in the Spanish Civil War to understand oppression and labor from the inside. A French Jew who was drawn increasingly toward Christian mysticism without ever being baptized, she combined rigorous political thought with religious longing in essays and notebooks that she left largely unpublished at her death. Weil died in England in 1943, weakened by tuberculosis and a wartime refusal to eat more than the rationed diet of occupied France. Her posthumously published books — including Gravity and Grace and The Need for Roots, written for the Free French government-in-exile — established her as one of the twentieth century's most searching moral thinkers, admired by figures from T. S. Eliot to Albert Camus, who edited her work into print.