ABSTRACT
Simone Weil experienced the uprootedness of the twentieth century early and continuously. She was born in Paris in 1909, the second child of assimilated French-Jewish parents. She was five years old when the First World War broke out, eight at the time of the Russian Revolution, and an adolescent during the immediate postwar years of economic and political chaos. An extraordinarily gifted child (although her self-confidence during childhood and adolescence was severely undermined by the mathematical accomplishments of her brother, André, who was three years her senior and who became one of the twentieth century’s most eminent mathematicians in the field of number theory), she blossomed into a brilliant student and received a spectacular training in philosophy, language, French literature, and mathematics in the lycées she attended during the 1920s. She was admitted in 1928 to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the apex of the French educational system, and passed her agrégation, the state examination that qualified her to teach in the upper lycées and universities, in 1931. She began her professional life in the midst of the economic chaos and despair of the Depression, at an optimum time to observe Hitler’s rise to power and the early stages of Europe’s inexorable progress toward the Second World War. Until 1937 (when her deteriorating health precluded it), she taught philosophy in a series of provincial girls’ lycées and put all her extracurricular time and energy at the service of Leftist, revolutionary, and working-class causes. During this period she conscientiously exposed herself to three experiences that eventually led her to despair of finding social solutions for the malheur, entropy, and uprootedness that she perceived to be proliferating and worsening throughout the decade: she visited Germany in the summer of 1932 and personally witnessed the “situation” there, the German Communist party’s impotence in preventing Hitler’s coming to power and in bringing about the long-heralded Communist revolution in Germany; she spent most of 1935 working as an unskilled laborer in three factories in the Paris region; and she served briefly as a combatant in the Spanish civil war in 1936. From 1933 to 1938 she wrote extensively for the Left and sporadically but consistently in support of a pacifism that strove to find ways to oppose Hitler without provoking a European war. She also passed through the early critical stages of the psychological shift toward a preeminently religious orientation that reached its full development after the outbreak of the Second World War. She made the shift privately, without any essential break in either her nature or her thought.
