Word: weil
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...Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris, to Dr. Bernard Weil and his wife, Selma. By Petrement's account Simone's were model parents--cultured yet unaffected, proud of their children's successes but not pushy, fun-loving and emotionally honest. Simone and her brother Andre, a precocious methematician who currently works at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton, enjoyed a materially privileged and psychologically peaceful childhood--spending early years and summers in the country and benefitting from the best of Parisian schooling during their teens and early twenties...
...nothing in Simone's background quite prepares the reader for the rush of intense intellectuality and social activism that marked her twenties. After graduation from the Lycee Henri IV in Paris, Weil entered France's prestigious Ecole Normale as one of the first women admitted to the institute, and proceeded to scandalize professors with her ardent and polemical radicalism. She habitually carried a trade union bulletin in one pocket of a rumpled man's jacket and the French communist newspaper L'Humanite in the other. She unabashedly solicited donations to worker relief funds from incredulous instructors...
...Simone nevertheless hurried to involve herself in the struggle for trade union unification, participating in demonstrations of the unemployed in nearby St. Etienne. There she gained a reputation in the local national press as a Moscow agent. (Weil never joined the Communist or any other party, and Petrement only hints that she may have wanted to at one time. In any case, what began as a vigorous skepticism about the value of political reforms and party discipline later grew into a repudiation of any faith in political goals, either revolutionary or reformist...
...Weil's resolve to share the material and psychological hardships of what she called society's "afflicted" led her, three years after receiving her teacher's certificate, to go through a year of factory work in an electrical shop and a Renault plant in Paris. Finding that she needed to train her body to operate like a machine to meet "piece-work" quotas, giving her neither time nor energy to think or reflect, Weil began to change all her notions about the chance of worker resistance and solidarity. She found that the oppressive conditions, instead of reinforcing her ideological belief...
...factory experience, along with a gradual disillusionment with political and unionist haggles that had set in the years before, finally led Weil to focus all her later, seminal writing on the question of how to alleviate this sense of enslavement. She rejected all forms of State domination, comparing both Hitler's fascist state and Stalin's Socialist state to the Republic and Empire of Ancient Rome, which she loathed. Even though she herself volunteered to fight alongside the Republic and during the Spanish Civil War, she pamphletted against France's involvement and against all forms of international war, abhoring...