Simone Weil

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks because of poor health and in order to devote herself to political activism. 

Such work saw her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a laborer, mostly in car factories, so that she could better understand the working class. Weil became increasingly religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed.

She wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.

Weil was born in her parent's apartment in Paris on 3 February 1909, the daughter of Bernard Weil (1872–1955), a medical doctor from an agnostic Alsatian Jewish background, who moved to Paris after the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother, Salomea "Selma" Reinherz (1879–1965), was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium.

According to Osmo Pekonen, "the family name Weil came to be when many Levis in the Napoleonic era changed their names this way, by anagram." Weil was a healthy baby for her first six months but then suffered a severe attack of appendicitis; thereafter, she struggled with poor health throughout her life. She was the younger of her parents' two children. Her brother was mathematician André Weil (1906–1998), with whom she would always enjoy a close relationship. Their parents were fairly affluent and raised their children in an attentive and supportive atmosphere.

Weil was distressed by her father's having to leave home for several years after being drafted to serve in the First World War. Eva Fogelman, Robert Coles, and several other scholars believe that this experience may have contributed to the exceptionally strong altruism which Weil displayed throughout her life. 

From her childhood home, Weil acquired an obsession with cleanliness; in her later life, she would sometimes speak of her "disgustingness" and think that others would see her this way, even though in her youth, she had been considered highly attractive. Weil was generally highly affectionate, but she almost always avoided any form of physical contact, even with female friends.

According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities for love affairs to fully pursue her vocation and improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her "fragile beauty" by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes.