Simone Weil

Born on February 3, 1909, in Paris, to a prosperous Alsatian Jewish family, Simone Adolphine Weil was the younger sister of Andre Weil, who would become one of the twentieth century's greatest mathematicians. She was brilliant and physically frail from childhood, plagued by severe headaches that tormented her throughout her short life. She studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure under the philosopher Alain and graduated at the top of her class. She became a teacher but could not confine herself to the classroom: she worked on assembly lines in Renault car factories to experience the condition of the working class firsthand, an ordeal she documented in essays of searing honesty. In 1936 she joined the anarchist Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, though her extreme nearsightedness made her a liability on the battlefield, she accidentally stepped into a pot of boiling oil and had to be evacuated. Her thought grew increasingly mystical, drawn to Christianity but refusing baptism because she could not accept a church that excluded non-believers. During the war she worked for the Free French government in London, writing The Need for Roots (1949) as a blueprint for the spiritual reconstruction of France. She restricted her food intake to what she believed was available to her compatriots under German occupation. She died of cardiac failure on August 24, 1943, in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, at thirty-four. The coroner noted that "the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat."