Simone Weil: Quai de Bourbon, Île Saint-Louis
LOCATIONS: 23, rue Clovis, Lycée Henri IV; 45, rue d’Ulm, École Normale Supérieure; 17, rue de la Sorbonne, The Courtyard
MÉTRO: Cluny-La Sorbonne; Maubert–Mutualité
Camus called Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our time.” For André Gide she was “the best spiritual writer of this century.” T. S. Eliot, not given to superlatives, considered her “a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz believed that “France offered a rare gift to the contemporary world in the person of Simone Weil.” American poet Adrienne Rich valued this “visionary” woman’s “stunning insights into domination and oppression.”
Though Simone Weil (1909–1943) is not exactly a starred name on the cultural map of Paris, since her death at the age of thirty-four, there have been more than twenty volumes of her writings published in Europe and the United States. Between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 scholarly works about her philosophy have appeared. It was Camus, who, as an editor at Gallimard, began the posthumous publication of her books and essays after the war (see here), including The Need for Roots, Waiting for God, and Gravity and Grace, a compilation from her many notebooks.
Born into a well-to-do, agnostic Jewish family, Weil’s religious identification is neither Jewish nor Christian. She did not “convert,” as some erroneously claim. Her life story has been called “tragicomic,” “mad,” masochistic. Always an outsider, she was misunderstood and ridiculed by some of her contemporaries (who nicknamed her the “Red Virgin”). Yet to this day she remains for many readers—who include believers and nonbelievers—a beacon of light and courage in a soulless world.
Growing up in Paris, she was a brilliant child, later the enfant terrible of the top Latin Quarter schools. As much as she enjoyed visiting cities in Spain and Italy, for her, Paris was always the most beautiful city in the world. As fervently as she, a devout disciple of Plato, loved any earthly thing, she loved Paris. The beauty of the world, she wrote toward the end of her life, was one of the signs of the presence of the hidden God.
Simone Weil thought about the idea of God throughout her childhood, the possibility and impossibility of his existence; coming up with no solution, no certainty, she decided to forget about it. Her parents never brought her to synagogue or any religious establishment. She did not like the observant orthodox Jews in the family, finding them rigid and legalistic. Her upbringing, entirely secular, like the enlightenment city that nurtured her on its own sacramentals—books, music, philosophy, mathematics, physics, activist politics, travel—consumed her “creative attention.” (In later years “creative attention” was her definition of prayer.)
As a student, hanging out through all-night discussions and debates in the Latin Quarter’s student cafés (most are gone), she expressed respect for Christianity, but she considered the institutional Catholic Church contaminated by its centuries-old alliance with the Roman Empire, inheriting its will to domination rather than honoring the original Christian command to serve the oppressed and the common good. Further, after the fall of the Empire, the Church established its own sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century, after its extermination of the Albigensians on the order of the pope and Saint Louis IX (see here). Although she admired the liturgy of the Church, especially Gregorian chant, and later told of a mystical experience in Assisi and again, while she read George Herbert’s poem “Love bade me welcome”—she said that afterward she felt the presence of Christ for the rest of her life—she rejected the Church’s embrace of power deriving from its militaristic Jewish and Roman sources; she also disliked its hierarchy and its historical record that included the Inquisition and the Crusades. Perhaps the thing she abhorred most was the Church’s practice of excommunicating heretics, those who dissented from a particular dogma. The formula anathema sit (“let him be anathema”) repelled her, as it had Peter Abelard. “The proper function of the intelligence demands total freedom,” she wrote.
For the Traveler
In 1913, the family moved to an apartment at 37, boulevard Saint-Michel (now a Benetton, which is funny because the absentminded student-professor dressed like a bag lady). In 1925, as a teenager, she entered the Lycée Henri IV at 23, rue Clovis. A short walk from home, up the hill of “Boul’Mich” and heading east over the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève around the Panthéon, Henri IV is perhaps the most prestigious of all the elite Parisian high schools.
MÉTRO: Saint-Michel; Cardinal Lemoine; Place Monge. Closed to the public except on conference and performance days, Lycée Henri IV occupies the sixth-century site of the church founded by the barbaric King Clovis—the Abbaye Sainte-Geneviève—named for the brave warrior woman who converted him to Christianity. In 1200 Peter Abelard taught classes here in the well-preserved Cloister, visible from the front entrance foyer. The monks’ refectory of 1220 is now the school’s chapel on rue Clotilde, named for Clovis’s devout wife. More than Clovis or Saint Genevieve or Peter Abelard, however, in modern Paris the most revered name connected with Lycée Henri IV is “Alain,” the philosophy teacher who was born Émile Chartier in 1868. Alain was considered by André Maurois and many generations of students and Parisian intellectuals “the greatest man of our time.” Alain’s lectures were the reason sixteen-year-old Simone Weil desperately wanted to win admission to Lycée Henri IV.
Henri IV prepared students for the rigorous entrance exams for École Normale Supérieure, a highly competitive division of the Sorbonne, where the teachers of France are educated. One of Alain’s best students, Simone became a normalienne in 1928, earning her agrégée de philosophie in 1931, outranking all her fellow students including Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. If you want to understand “the mystery of French intellectuality,” wrote Tony Judt, “you must begin here at ENS.” Since 1850, “virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction … graduated from it.”1
MÉTRO: Place Monge; Censier-Daubenton. L’École Normale Supérieure at 45, rue d’Ulm, a ten-minute walk from Lycée Henri IV, along rue Clotilde behind the Panthéon and left into rue d’Ulm, has a lovely students’ garden that’s open to the public on weekends and some weekdays.
Sitting here on a calm Sunday morning, a plashing fountain at the center encircled by magnificent tall trees, you can observe the rituals of French intellectual seriousness. Here and there students on benches discuss and argue back and forth, attentive like lovers to the words spoken. Clouds of cigarette smoke drift above their slim bodies, the intense dark eyes. Normaliens study here in the sculptured presences of French genius: the stone heads of Foucault, Louis Aragon, Lavoisier, Descartes, Pascal, Pierre Corneille, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand—a pantheon of secular gods. Simone Weil, who ate little, was never without a cigarette. A top student, aggressively idealistic, antiauthoritarian, leftist, committed to activism on behalf of workers, unions, and the poor, the ENS administration was glad to be rid of her in 1931 when she went off to her first teaching job. Had she studied here ten years later, during the Occupation, she, whose resistance to fascism throughout the thirties was constant, public, and dangerous—a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, she almost lost a foot when she stumbled into a pot of boiling oil—she probably would not have survived the surveillance and censorship of the Nazis. The ENS student body, which identified with and participated in the Resistance, provoked four raids by the Gestapo in 1944 alone as well as the arrest of its director, Georges Bruhat, who died at Buchenwald.2
What she worshipped throughout her years at Lycée Henri IV and École Normale Supérieure was the moral seriousness of these schools which kindled her desire to make the world a more just place for the “unfortunate.” (Camus was committed to giving a voice to the “lost causes.”) She sought to solve the scandal of social injustice in action, not in the abstract theories of the lecture halls. At the age of eleven, and then as a teenaged student at Henri IV, she became determined to share the fate of the downtrodden, live as they did. (Though she never ran away from her parents’ comfortable apartment to a squat in eastern Paris.) Throughout these years she joined demonstrations for disempowered workers, attended union meetings, wrote petitions, tried to bully her professors into signing them, and, despising materialism and bourgeois complacency, practiced the self-denying habits of an ascetic. (Except for the cigarettes.)
She loved walking the streets of Paris and along the quays on the Seine, especially on the Île Saint-Louis, where a favorite tutor lived. “There were not many places she liked as much as the quays,” according to her school friend, Simone Pétrement, who often walked with her and later became her biographer.
A graduate herself of Henri IV and ENS, Pétrement realized in the course of their long walks through the Latin Quarter and the Luxembourg that though Alain’s ideas did influence Simone, she had conceived some of them on her own, before she became his student. In particular, the obligation to act in solidarity with the poor was her own deepest moral conviction and in her view the core morality of all religions; though a professed agnostic, she was especially inspired by the Christian Gospels’ predilection for the poor.
For Alain, philosophy was a commentary on religion. Each religion, he said, has its own kind of truth, its own validity. Simone never abandoned Alain’s open-minded respect for all strata of religious experience. Years later, when she and her parents were running from the Nazis in Marseille, waiting for an escape ship to the United States, she told a priest confidant that she loved Christ but did not feel that God wanted her to enter the Catholic Church. One reason was the admiration she had for other religious traditions. She loved Krishna, Hinduism, the Baghadavita, the Book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the Egyptian mysteries. She didn’t want to attach herself “exclusively to Christianity.”3
After fighting in World War I, Alain had become a radical pacifist, convincing his Paris students in the twenties and thirties of the futility of war (some blamed his influence for the unpreparedness of the French army before the Nazi invasion); Alain also insisted it was necessary to have fought in order to have the right to judge. Alain’s pacifism influenced but did not create Simone’s hatred of force and violence. The basis of her hatred stemmed from her critique of the Roman Empire, Homer’s Iliad, and the Hebrew Bible’s Jehovah who crushed Canaan. Her animus against militarism culminated in her 1939 essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”—“one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written,” to quote Elizabeth Hardwick—in which Simone argued that the effect of the cruelty of combat depicted in Homer’s epic was the destruction of the human spirit: the force that kills turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.
And yet Simone supported the war against the totalitarian dictatorship of Hitler. She had no use for the totalitarian mysticism of Marxism, the U.S.S.R., and the Communist Party (though at ENS some called her a communist for her leftist sympathies). For her, the party was, as Pétrement quotes her, “a bureaucratic, military, and police dictatorship that has nothing socialist or communist about it but the name.”
Simone Weil never did anything to please others or to sugarcoat her intransigent opinions. Simone de Beauvoir remembered seeing her one day walking through the courtyard of the Sorbonne, followed by a group of Alain’s disciples, holding forth about the scandal of a famine in China. She and Simone Weil differed on what the solution should be (Weil said the starving needed food, Beauvoir said they needed meaning). The brief hostile exchange that followed cut off any friendship they might have formed as serious intellectual women.
MÉTRO:Saint-Michel; Cluny-La Sorbonne. You may enter the courtyard of the Sorbonne at 17, rue de la Sorbonne, asking permission of the guards at the entrance, maybe having to show a photo ID depending on their moods. It’s an inspiring space, alive with eight centuries of students’ energy and fractious history: the Church’s conservative control in the beginning (see here), followed by royal control, eventually undone by the Revolution, evolving since then into many different schools in many Parisian locations. The dome (and façade) of Richelieu’s chapel at the southern end, the wonderful compass/sundial to the north, the elegant façades to the west, and to the east, the sculpture of Louis Pasteur. Schoolchildren from the suburbs who visit the courtyard between semesters find the compass/sundial, in particular, thrilling. Individual tours are available on Saturdays; you must book at least three months in advance of your visit. www.sorbonne.fr/en/the-sorbonne/visiting. Tel: 01.40.46.23.48 or go to visites.sorbonne@ac-paris-fr.
Simone Weil is remembered today at Lycée Henri IV and at ENS as one of the most brilliant prodigies of the Sorbonne’s educational institutions. Her strange conflicted life reflects the glory of the Latin Quarter, the quartier of youth in all its contradictions and extremes of idealism and courage. She qualifies as a true descendant of Peter Abelard, the spiritual founding father of the hill’s first great school. Both Christian father and Jewish daughter are souls in exile, antiestablishment originals who died young, at once vilified and cherished by the city they loved.
When she took breaks from her teaching jobs or stints on the assembly lines to come home to Paris, she walked the streets she’d known since childhood with old school friends and the union members she knew and worked with in the provinces; they went to the Odéon Théâtre and concerts; she visited many churches and bookshops. She continued to publicly protest France’s abuse and exploitation of its colonies in Africa and Indochina. She wrote and wrote and wrote, the articles and notebooks and essays that now, thanks to Camus, belong to world literature. In Gravity and Grace and in the essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” she expresses her personal credo: God is really, though secretly, present in religious ceremonies; in one’s friends; neighbors; and in the beauty of the world. Like the Greeks (and Blake and Teilhard de Chardin), she saw no line separating the spiritual and the secular. The work of seeking justice for the “unfortunate” she sees as a kind of obedience, an imitation of the “divine” model presented in the Gospels.
Compared to Simone de Beauvoir, who spent the Occupation years in Paris (1940–1944) attending concerts and theater and writing to Sartre (see Letters to Sartre), Simone Weil’s antifascist convictions turned her into what some more cautious Résistants considered a wild-eyed fanatic. She worked for the Resistance in Marseille, also helping imprisoned Vietnamese refugees to escape. Finally, she left France for New York and then made her way to London, where she worked again for the Resistance, intent on activating her plan to parachute nurses—including herself—onto the front lines of France to save wounded French soldiers from bleeding to death. De Gaulle thought her plan “mad.” It was in fact a plan similar to the one Marie Curie activated successfully on the front lines during World War I.
Because Weil hardly ate, accepting only the same number of rations as the people of France were surviving on, her always frail health deteriorated, she contracted tuberculosis, refused surgery. There was mutual dislike between her and the attending doctor at the British hospital where she died; he reported her death as a suicide, that she starved herself to death. Years later, medical records and archival research have found that the hospital food was inedible, she actually asked for food (to be cooked in the French way: she could not stomach English potatoes). She was never intentionally suicidal: the doctor was hostile to this strange woman with a mind of her own and hellbent on parachuting into France. Cardiac arrest was a factor in her death in Ashford, England, in August 1943.
When Albert Camus received word in 1957 that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the story goes that he went immediately to the home of Weil’s parents at 3, rue Auguste Comte (Métro: RER B, Luxembourg) to declare that it was Simone who deserved the prize much more than he did. Until his own early death in 1960, as an acquiring editor for Gallimard, he continued to visit the Weils, reading Simone’s manuscripts, sitting at the large table—it looked down over the hedges and the southwestern corner of the Luxembourg Gardens—where Simone had done much of her writing. Rue Auguste Comte’s prospect from the high floor of the Weil’s apartment—where, at their daughter’s request, they had hidden refugees from Nazi Berlin after 1933—is the site of the original Carthusian monastery, the Chartreuse (Charterhouse) de Vauvert built on the abandoned Château de Vauvert in 1258. After the Revolution, the French Directory confiscated the land though they preserved the famous “pépinière”—nursery garden and vineyards—at the south end of the park. In the 1860s Haussmann extended the Luxembourg by cutting off and transforming the old nursery garden into an English garden with winding paths, planting a fruit garden in the southwest corner, which is still there. Simone often walked here—a ten-minute walk from Lycée Henri IV and ENS down the hill of the Panthéon through the Luxembourg’s east entrance on boulevard Saint-Michel. She loved the ancient branching trees reaching down to the lawns, she did not like the statues. Just over the hedges along the southern border, there is a plaque on the façade of her parents’ building: Simone Weil, philosophe, a habité cette maison de 1929 à 1940.
Nearby
CHURCH OF SAINT-SÉVERIN Between rue Saint-Jacques and rue de la Harpe. There’s a certain resonance between this church and Simone Weil’s story. Originally the site of the hermit Séverin’s sixth-century retreat, it developed into a church in the twelfth century and then was enlarged to meet the spiritual needs of the growing Sorbonne congregation. Outside, on the south side, the galleries of the only surviving charnel house in Paris arc around a garden and a sculpture of a hermit. “Preserve your solitude,” Weil wrote, perhaps in approval of Séverin. Inside, the oval-shaped Mansart chapel displays the lithographs of Georges Rouault entitled “Miserere,” to accompany Psalm 50.
GIBERT JOSEPH 26, 30, 32, 34, boulevard Saint-Michel. Four stores on the west side of the boulevard stocked with books, DVDs, CDs, vinyl, full floors of classical music, jazz, current and classic movies. Jean Genet was arrested as a child for theft in the bookstore.
LE CHAMPO The legendary movie theater, on the corner of rue Champollion at 51, rue des Écoles, showing classic and current films. Simone Weil’s favorite actor and film was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
