French philosopher, activist, and religious searcher, whose death in 1943 was hastened by starvation. Simone Weil published during her lifetime only a few poems and articles. With her posthumous works – 16 volumes, edited by André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy – Weil has earned a reputation as one of the most original thinkers of her era. T. S. Eliot described Weil as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints."

"Punishment is a vital need of the human soul. There are two kinds of punishment, disciplinary and penal. The former offers security against failings with which it would be too exhausting to struggle if there were no exterior support. But the most indispensable punishment for the soul is that inflicted for crime. By committing crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by the law." (The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind by Simone Weil, translated from the French by A. F. Wills, with a preface by T. S. Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952, p. 20; original title L'Enracinement, 1949)

Simone Weil was born in Paris in her parents' apartment on the Rue de Strasbourg. Later the family moved to a larger flat on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Simone was raised in an agnostic Jewish family. Her father, Bernard Weil (1872-1955), was an Alsace physician and her mother (née Salomea Reinherz), was Austro-Galician. Salomea (or Selma) Weil (1879-1965) came from a wealthy family of Jewish businessmen. She had wanted to become a doctor but her father forbad it. For her own amazing children she wanted the best education available.

Weil's brother André solved mathematical problems beyond the doctoral level at the age of twelve; he became a distinguished mathematician. Selma Weil's solicitude had also an excessive side – she had a phobic dread of microbes and imposed on her children compulsive hand washing. Mme Weil ruled, that outside the immediate family, nobody else was allowed to kiss the children. Throughout her life, Simone avoided most forms of physical contact. She also had problems with food. At the age of six she refused to eat sugar, because it was not rationed to French soldiers in the war. In the late 1930s, possibly due to her malnutrition, she had mystical experiences.

In her early teens, Weil mastered Greek and several modern languages. With André, she sometimes communicated in ancient Greek. When after the Russian Revolution she was accused of being a Communist by a classmate, she answered: "Pas du tout! I am a Bolshevik." (The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky, University of Chicago Press, 2021, p. 5) Weil studied at the Lycée Fénelon (1920-24) and Lycée Victor Duruy, Paris (1924-25), graduating with baccalauréat. She then continued her studies at the Lycée Henri IV (1925-28), where she was taught by the noted French philosopher Alain, pseudonym of Emile Auguste Chartier (1868-1951). He trained his students to think critically by assigning them topoi, take-home essay examinations.

In 1928, Weil finished first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure; Simone de Beauvoir finished second. During the following years Weil attracted much attention with her uncompromising attitudes. Around the Left Bank of Paris, the myopic and awkward Weil was called the "Red Virgin." When de Beauvoir encountered her in a courtyard of the Sorbonne, Weil classified her just a high-minded little bourgeoisie. Their relationship did not go any firther. "I was angry," wrote de Beauvoir later in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1974). (Simone Weil by Palle Yourgrau, Reaktion Books, 2012, p. 40) In 1931 Weil received her agrégation in philosophy.

Though physically weak, Weil alternated stints of teaching philosophy with manual labour in factories and fields, in order to understand the real needs of the workers. She insisted that writing should be based on experience. "The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell," she once said. (Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom: A Collection of 10,000 Inspirational Quotations, compiled by Andy Zubko, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2004, p. 379) Between the years 1931 and 1938, she was employed by various schools in Le Puy, Auxerre, Roanne, Bourges, and Saint-Quentin. "Whenever, in life, one is actively involved in something, or one suffers violently, one cannot think about oneself," Weil taught at the lycée for girls at Roanne. (Lectures on Philosophy by Simone Weil, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 28)

Weil did not associate with her teacher colleagues but preferred the company of workers and sat with them in cafés. Her salary she shared with the unemployed. After participating in a protest march, she was forced to resign from Le Puy-en-Velay high school. In 1934-35 she was a "hopelessly inept" factory worker for Renault, Alsthom, and J. J. Carnaud. This hard period nearly crushed her emotionally and physically – she had abnormally small, feeble hands. And she worked slower than the other women workers.

In spite of her pacifist beliefs, she served in 1936 briefly as a volunteer with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. The novelist Georges Bataille described her as "a Don Quixot". "'I knew her very well,' Trotsky wrote in a letter of July 30, 1936, to his comrade Victor Serge. 'I have had long discussions with her. For a period of time she was more or less in sympathy with our cause, but then she lost faith in the proletariat and in Marxism. It's possible that she will turn toward the left again. But is it worth the trouble to talk about this any longer?'" (The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit by Adolf Holl, Bantam Books, 1998, p. 211)

Armed with a rifle but nearsighted, she was a danger to herself and everyone around her. A clumsy accident forced her to leave the front: she stuck her foot in a pot or frying pan of boiling cooking oil. Luckily, her foot was protected by boot but the lower part of her leg and the instep were seriously burnt. When the stocking was removed, all the skin came off with it.

To the personal question that she was facing, would she truly be able to kill someone, she never found an answer. Weil wrote a pacifist article published in Vigilance in October 1936, entitled 'Do We Have to Grease Our Combat Boots?' which asked rhetorically: "Can any war bring to the world more justice, more liberty, more well being?" (quoted in 'Thinking Against the Current': Literature and Political Resistance by Sybil Oldfield, Sussex Academic Press, 2015, p. 148)

After witnessing the horrors of war in Spain, Weil revealed in her journals her deepening disillusionment with ideologies. She saw that Communism led to the formation of a State dictatorship. "From human beings, no help can be expected," she wrote already in 1934. ('Weil, Simone' by Linda Mills Woolsey, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier, Routledge, 1997, p. 888)

Differing from the Marxist doctrine of "inevitable" workers' revolution, her conclusions were pessimistic: oppression does not engender revolt but rather submission. Sex was something she was afraid of. For a time Weil felt attraction to Anarchism and Syndicalism and she worked for the anarchist trade union movement La Révolution Prolétarianne. In the mid-1930s Weil became increasingly drawn to Christianity. However, she refused baptism into the Catholic Church. 

Upon returning to France, she obtained a teaching post at Saint-Quentin. Headaches continued to plague her. In 1938 she converted from Judaism to Christianity. Weil studied Greek poetry and Gregorian music, and in 1937 at the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi, in Asssisi, Italy, she had one of her mystical experiences. Occasionally she dressed in the clothes of a poor monk or a soldier. In 1940 the Vichy anti-Jewish laws required her dismissal from teaching. Weil wrote a letter to the Vichy Ministry of Education, in which she denied that she was a Jew.

Like many French intellectuals, Weil left behind her pacifist stance, as the realization grew, that France would be drawn into a war with Germany, once again. "Non-violence is only good if it is effective," she wrote in her notebook. "Hence the question put by the young man to Gandhi concerning his sister. The answer ought to be: use force, unless you happen to be such that you can defend her, with as much probability of success, without resorting to violence; unless you radiate an energy (that is to say, a potential efficacy in the strictly material sense) equal to that contained in your muscles."  (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, translated from the French by Arthur Wills, Routledge, 2004, pp. 96-97) During the first years of World War II Weil lived with her parents in Paris, Vichy, and Marseilles. She continued to write and worked at Gustave Thibon's vineyards in Saint-Marcel d'Ardéche.

Before leaving France, she gave to Thibon her notebooks and other papers, which formed the core of her posthumous works. In Marseilles she met Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, with whom she had long discussions, but refused finally his offer to baptize her into the Catholic faith. She fled from Nazi occupation with her parents to the United States. Her stay lasted only four months.

While in New York, she wrote Lettre à un religieux (Letter to a Priest) and Cahiers d'Amerique. In November 1942 she left New York for England, where she joined Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement in London. She wanted to be parachuted into France with a group of nurses.

Simone Weil died at the age of 34 of tuberculosis and self-neglect in a sanatorium at Ashford in Kent on August 24, 1943. She had almost stopped eating out of sympathy for the plight of the people of Occupied France and refused medical treatment. This act hastened her death, although it is debated whether her death was a result of actual suicide or mental illness. Weil read and wrote and maintained her mental lucidity. The coroner's verdict was suicide.

"The central law of this world, from which God has withdrawn by his very act of creation, is the law of gravity, which is to be found analogously in every stage of existence. Gravity is the force which above all others draws us from God. It impels each creature to seek everything which can preserve or enlarge it and, as Thucydides says, to exercise all the power of which it is capable. Psychologically it is shown by all those motives which are directed toward asserting or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence, that is to say, to remain apart from and opposed to God." (Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills, with an introduction by Gustave Thibon, New York: G P. Putnam's Sons, 1952, p. 20)

Weil's political philosophy is best expressed in the L'Enracinement (1949, The Need for Roots). She wrote it in 1943 at the request of the Free French organization as a guide to the reconstruction of post-war France. De Gaulle considered to book too theoretical and it was not published until 1949. Weil dedicated the first edition of the book to Albert Camus. Twenty-five years after her death, before traveling to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus visited her parent's home, "and spent some quiet moments of reflection in her room." (Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion by Maria Clara Bingemer, translated by Karen M. Kraft, foreword by Tomeu Estelrich, Cascade Books, 2015, p. 112) In his preface to the English translation, T. S. Eliot describes Weil as a passionate champion of the common people and especially of the oppressed, and, on the other hand, an individualist, with a profound horror of the collectivity.

According to Weil, the great problem of society is "déracinement" (uprootedness); its cure is a social order grounded in a "spiritual core" of physical labor. One can find from work beauty, poetry and spiritual inspiration. "A civilization based upon the spirituality of work would give to Man the very strongest possible roots in the wide universe, and would consequently be the opposite of that state in which we find ourselves now, characterized by an almost total uprootedness. Such a civilization is, therefore, by its very nature, the object to which we should aspire as the antidote to our sufferings." (Ibid., p. 94)

Oppression et liberté (1955, Oppression and Liberty) takes as its issue the nature and possibility of individual freedom in various political and social systems. "We are in a period of transition; but a transition towards what?" Weil asked. She opted for liberalism rather than socialism.

For further reading: Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love by Jacques Cabaud (1964); Simone Weil: A Sketch for a Portrait by Richard Rees (1966); Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Pétrement (1976; orig. French edition La Vie de Simone Weil, 1973); Simone Weil by Dorothy T. McFarland (1983); Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles (1987); Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth by Pat Little (1988); Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography by Gabriella Fiori (1989); Red Virgin: A Poem Of Simone Weil by Stephanie Strickland (1993); Simone Weil: An Introduction by Heiz Abosh (1994); Simone Weil: On Politics, Religion and Society by Christopher Frost and Rebecca Bell-Metereau (1998); Simone Weil by Francine du Plessix Gray (2001); Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion by Maria Clara Bingemer (2015); The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky (2021); Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene by Kathryn Lawson (2024); A Declaration of Duties Toward Humankind: A Critical Companion to Simone Weil's The Need for Roots, edited by Eric O. Springsted, Ronald K.L. Collins (2024); Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone (2024). See also: Rosa Luxemburg

Selected works:

• L'Iliade ou le poème de la force, 1939-1940
  - The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force (translated by Mary McCarthy, 1956) / Simone Weil's The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition (translated by James P. Holoka, 2003) 
• La Pesanteur et la grâce, 1947
  - Gravity and Grace (translated by Arthur Wills, 1952)
  - Painovoima ja armo (suom. Maija Lehtonen, 1957)
• L'Enracinement;  prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain, 1949
  - The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind (translated by Arthur Wills, 1952; translated by Ros Schwartz; with an introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick, 2023)
  - Juurtuminen (suom. Kaisa Kukkola, 2007)
• L'attente de Dieu, 1950 (edited by J. M. Perrin)
  - Waiting for God (translated by Emma Craufurd, 1951) / Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attende de Dieu and Lettre à un Religieux (translated by Brad Jersak and Adit Gamble, 2012) 
• La connaissance surnaturelle, 1950
  - First and Last Notebooks (translated by Richard Rees, 1970)
• Cahiers, 1951-56 (3 vols.)
  - The Notebooks of Simone Weil (translated by Arthur Wills, 1976)
• Intuitions pré-chrétiennes, 1951
  - Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (translated by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler, 1957)
• La Condition ouvrière, 1951
• Lettre à un religieux, 1951
  - Letter to a Priest (translated by A.F. Wills, 1954) / Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attende de Dieu and Lettre à un Religieux (translated by Brad Jersak and Adit Gamble, 2012) 
• La Source grecque, 1953
• Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l'oppression sociale, 1955
• Oppression et liberté, 1955
  - Oppression and Liberty (translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie, 1958)
• Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 1957
• Leçons de philosophie, 1959
  - Lectures on Philosophy (translated by H. Price,  with an introd. by Peter Winch, 1978)
• Écrits politiques et historiques, 1960
• Pensées sans ordre concernant l'amour de Dieu, 1962
• Selected Essays, 1934-43, 1962 (chosen and translated by Richard Rees)
• Seventy Letters. Some Hitherto Untranslated Texts from Published and Unpublished Sources 1965 (translated by Richard Rees)
• Sur la science, 1966
  - On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (translated by Richard Rees, 1968)
• Gateway to God, 1974 (edited by David Raper, Malcolm Muggeridge and Vernon Sproxton)
• The Simone Weil Reader, 1977 (edited by George A. Panichas)
• Two Moral Essays, 1981 (edited by Ronald Hathaway)
• Simone Weil, An Anthology, 1986 (translated by Siân Miles)
• Formative Writings, 1929-41, 1987 (edited and translated by Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness)
• Œuvres Complètes, 1989-2006 (6 vols., edited by André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy)
• Simone Weil on Colonialism, 2003 (edited and translated by J.P. Little)
• Late Philosophical Writings, 2015 (translated by Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt)
  
• Love in the Void: Where God Fnds Us, 2018 (edited by Laurie Brands Gagne)
  
• Correspondance 1942: "quel est donc ton tourment?" 2018 (Simone Weil, Joë Bousquet; réunie, présentée et annotée par Florence de Lussy & Michel Narcy)
• The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations Towards the Human Being, 2023 (L'Enracinement; translated by Ros Schwartz; with an introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick)
  
• Mirror of Obedience: The Poems and Selected Prose of Simone Weil, 2023 (translated by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson)
  
• Simone Weil: Basic Writings, 2024 (edited and translated by D. K. Levy, Marina Barabas)
  
• A Life in Letters, 2024 (edited by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux in collaboration with Marie-Noelle Chenavier-Jullien, Annette Devaux, and Olivier Rey; translated by Nicholas Elliott)