Simone Weil
French philosopher, writer, and social activist (1909-1943) · France · Academics · Died at 34
Simone Weil is read about 2,511 times a day, in 66 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A philosopher who spent a year working factory floors to understand labor from the inside, then starved herself in wartime London out of solidarity with occupied France - and died at 34, leaving behind writings that wouldn't find their audience until a decade later.
A life in dates
Photos 8
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In their own words 10
, Wrongly or rightly you think that I have a right to the name of Christian.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
The prospects of revolution seem therefore quite restricted. For can a revolution avoid war?
Awards
In their orbit
Sibling: André WeilAbout this person
Born in Paris in 1909 to an Alsatian Jewish family, Simone Weil taught intermittently through the 1930s, breaking often for health and activism. She joined the anarchist Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War and worked twelve months as a labourer in car factories to grasp working-class life from within. As the decade turned, she grew more religious and mystical in her thinking. By 1943 she was in Britain with the Free French government in exile, restricting her food intake to match rations in Nazi-occupied France. She died of heart failure that August, at 34. Her writings drew little notice in her lifetime but erupted across Europe and the English-speaking world in the 1950s and '60s, where they've stayed - studied now in fields from politics to feminism to theology.
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