Simone Weil

About the author

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, political activist, and laborer whose brief life produced ideas of enduring influence across philosophy, theology, and politics. Born in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family, she taught through the 1930s while engaging in trade union activism and supporting the anarchist Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War. She worked in car factories to understand the working class firsthand, and grew increasingly drawn to Christian mysticism and asceticism.

She died of heart failure in wartime Britain, having restricted her own food intake in solidarity with occupied France.