This most amazing French woman symbolizes the high price we must pay for solidarity with the oppressed, for interfaith dialogue, and for intellectual integrity. She would eat no more than the available rations of the poor, and earn no more than they could earn, which finally led to her early death in 1943. Although a Jew who loved the Gospel of Christ, she agreed to live on the margins of both groups -- without baptism, refusing the comforts of group reassurance, she tried to live her whole life "waiting for God" and critiqued both the Marxists on the Right and the intellectuals on the Left. Always she paid the price of standing in between, and mending the breach, desiring to be a sign of contradiction and reconciliation for both her Jewish, Christian and secular friends. Her writings show her to be an astute intellectual, a mystic and saint, and a social strategist all at the same time.
Weil often took actions out of sympathy with the working class. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the worker's movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated worker's rights. At this time, she was a Marxist, pacifist, and trade unionist. While teaching in Le Puy, she became involved in local political activity, supporting the unemployed and striking workers despite criticism by some who were better off. She also wrote about social and economic issues, including Oppression and Liberty and numerous short articles for trade union journals. This work critiqued popular Marxist thought, and gave a pessimistic account of the limits of both capitalism and socialism.
She participated in the French general strike of 1933, called to protest unemployment and wage cuts. The following year she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a laborer in two factories, one owned by Renault, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class. Her poor health and inadequate physical strength forced her to quit after some months. In 1935 she resumed teaching, and donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavors.
In 1936, despite her pacifism, she fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. She identified herself as an anarchist and joined the Sébastien Faure Century, the French-speaking section of the anarchist militia. However, her clumsiness repeatedly put her comrades at risk. After burning herself over a cooking fire, she left Spain to recuperate in Assisi. She continued to write essays on labor and management issues, as well as war and peace.
While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, she experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church in which Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed, which led her to pray for the first time in her life. She had another, more powerful revelation a year later, and from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues. She was attracted to Roman Catholicism, but declined to be baptized, until the very end of her life; she explained this refusal in letters published in Waiting for God. During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from a Dominican friar. Around this time she met the French Catholic author Gustave Thibon, who later edited some of her work.
Weil did not limit her curiosity to Christianity. She was keenly interested in other traditions — especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita), and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and others were valid paths to God. She was, nevertheless, opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:
Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else...A "synthesis" of religion implies a lower quality of attention.
In 1942, she travelled first to the USA, then to London, where she joined the French Resistance. The punishing work regime she assumed soon took a heavy toll; in 1943 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and activism, and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of the parts of France occupied by the Germans ate. She most likely ate even less, as she refused food on most occasions. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England.
After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August of 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34. The coroner's report said that "the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed."
In 1943 the term anorexia nervosa was not well known and the condition not always recognised, though it would appear that it may have been a factor in the death of Simone Weil.
