Weil, Simone (sēmôn` vīl), 1909–43, French philosopher and mystic. After receiving her baccalauréat with honors at 15, she studied philosophy for four years, then entered (1928) the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which she graduated in 1931. She then taught in secondary schools and contributed many articles to socialist and Communist journals. She was active in the Spanish civil war until her health failed. Born into a free-thinking Jewish family, she became strongly attracted in 1940 to Roman Catholicism, believing that Jesus on the Cross was a bridge between God and man. Most of her works, published posthumously, consist of some notebooks and a collection of religious essays. They include, in English, Waiting for God (1951), Gravity and Grace (1952), The Need for Roots (1952), Notebooks (2 vol., 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958), and Selected Essays, 1934–1943 (1962).

Bibliography

See biographies by J. Cabaud (tr. 1965), R. Rees (1966), S. Petrement (tr. 1976), G. Fiori (1989), and F. du P. Gray (2001); R. Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (1987); M. G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil (1988); bibliography by J. P. Little (1973).

Weil, Simone

(born Feb. 3, 1909, Paris, France—died Aug. 24, 1943, Ashford, Kent, Eng.) French mystic and social philosopher. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, she taught philosophy in several girls' schools from 1931 to 1938. To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in an auto factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. She assisted the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War and aided the French Resistance from London from 1942. Born Jewish, she converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1940s. She died at age 34 of tuberculosis complicated by self-imposed starvation undertaken out of sympathy for those suffering in occupied France. Her posthumously published works, including Gravity and Grace (1947), The Need for Roots (1949), Waiting for God (1950), and Notebooks (3 vol., 1951–56) explore her own religious life and analyze the individual's relation to the state and to God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.