Simone Weil

A Philosophy Teacher on a Factory Floor

Born to a secular Jewish family in Paris, she was a formidably gifted student — sharp enough that a fellow student at the École Normale Supérieure, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, remembered being intimidated by Weil outright. She became a philosophy teacher, gave much of her modest salary away to unemployed and striking workers, and then kept leaving philosophy to go find out what she was actually writing about: a year on a factory floor, anonymously, in 1934–35 to understand industrial exhaustion firsthand, and a stint with an anarchist militia unit in the Spanish Civil War in 1936: nearsighted and not wearing her glasses, she stepped into a concealed pot of boiling cooking oil, burned her leg badly, and had to leave. A series of mystical experiences drew her toward Christianity in her final years, though she refused baptism, in solidarity, she said, with everyone the Church stood apart from.

A Grave She Didn't Choose

She died on August 24, 1943, at a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, of cardiac failure brought on by tuberculosis and self-imposed starvation. She was thirty-four. The coroner's inquest recorded that she "killed herself by refusing to eat" while "the balance of her mind was disturbed" — an old legal formula for finding someone not of sound mind — a verdict her closest friends rejected outright, insisting a conviction is not a symptom just because it costs a life. She was buried in the Catholic section of the town cemetery despite never having been baptized into any church.