ABSTRACT
From the very beginning of Simone Weil’s professional life, the interest in the worker she had shown in “Science and Perception in Descartes” was translated into action on behalf of the working class. When she was appointed a professor of philosophy at a girls’ lycée in the provincial city of Le Puy in 1931, she also became both a political activist and an indefatigable supporter of the revolutionary working-class movement. She was a vocal member of two teachers’ unions, one affiliated with the reformist CGT (Confédération générale du Travail) and the other with the Communist-dominated CGTU (Confédération générale du Travail unitaire). She traveled weekly to the industrial city of St. Etienne, about fifty miles from Le Puy, in order to work with a revolutionary syndicalist group and with the Labor Exchange (the regional trade-union organization) there. She wrote for L’Ecole émancipée, the publication of the teachers’ trade union affiliated with the CGTU, the revolutionary syndicalist journal La Revolution prolétarienne, and L’Effort, the newspaper of the construction-workers’ trade union of Lyon. In less than a year her tireless activity, her dedication, and her penetrating and critical intelligence had made her something of a minor celebrity within the French Left.
