Simone Weil in Wartime London by Elias Forneris

Today’s special episode is by Elias Forneris. Elias obtained a B.A. in Political Science & History from Sciences Po Paris, specialising in the Middle East & Mediterranean. He then obtained a B.A. in History from Columbia University in New York, specialising in Modern Europe. At the University of Cambridge, Elias graduated with a MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History and is currently pursuing a PhD in the area of Intellectual History.

Elias serves on the Editorial Board of The Tocqueville Review and is an Editor for the website Tocqueville 21. His work has featured in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, in The Tocqueville Review, and in the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.

In this episode Elias explores famous French mystic Simone Weil’s time in London as an exile during World War 2 and its impact on her writings.

Elias: Thank you for the introduction, and welcome to today’s episode of the French History podcast.

During the last five years I’ve undertaken research at the University of Cambridge, I’ve been studying refugees who fled mainland Europe during WW2. My expertise is refugees who found exile in the United Kingdom.

This year is particularly special, because 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, since it ended in 1945.

Today I have got a fascinating story for you about one of these refugees.

It’s the story of Simone Weil, a French philosopher who was exiled in London from 1942 to 1943, and who tragically died at the age of 34.

I want to tell you about the few months she spent in London, and what ideas she had for General de Gaulle’s French government-in-exile.

Simone Weil’s story truly matters because she was one of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century. And the Second World War was the most critical time in the century.

To give you a little idea of who Simone Weil was, let me tell you about a proposal she wrote in May 1940 while France was under attack from Germany.

Weil had a unique idea to train a corps of volunteer nurses. These nurses would be brought to the front in France. Some of these nurses would be parachuted in from Britain.

The nurses would help wounded combatants while under fire, or while under threat of being captured by the enemy.

Her plan was for nurses to literally “offer their lives as a sacrifice.” It effectively would have been a suicide mission.

And she wanted to be one of those nurses.

Later in the war, Weil sent her proposal to the Franklin Roosevelt’s White House in Washington DC.

The White House answered that it was unrealistic.

General de Gaulle, said it was plain “madness!”

That anecdote was representative of Simone Weil’s life: she wanted to devote herself to those who are hurt, even if it was dangerous or idealistic.

Let’s step back a few years and tell you a little more about who Simone Weil was.

Simone Weil, spelled W-E-I-L, shouldn’t be confused with the French politician Simone Veil, spelled V-E-I-L, who presided the European Parliament in the early 1980s.

Our Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 to a relatively prosperous family of the bourgeoisie. Her father was a doctor. Her family had a Jewish background, but did not practice the religion.

By all accounts she was something of a child prodigy, learning ancient languages, literature, mathematics, and memorizing theatre with incredible ease.

She graduated from high school at 16 and was admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure at 19. The ENS is considered by many as the best school for French literary studies.

Funnily, some say she wasn’t even the smartest person in her family.

Her brother André Weil was a brilliant mathematician who went on to teach at the University of Chicago, then worked in Princeton, in the same institute that Einstein and Oppenheimer worked in.

Simone Weil is famous for texts such as Gravity and Grace, and The Need for Roots, which in French is called L’Enracinement.

Because she died young, her fame was largely posthumous.

During her life, Weil was tired of people constantly saying she was smart. It irritated her. Instead, she wanted people to ask if what she was saying was true.

In any case, her life was truly out of the ordinary.

First, how did Simone Weil get to London? And why did she pass away so young while she was there?

One has to understand that after France was defeated by Germany in June 1940, a complete migratory debacle ensued, which was called the ‘exodus.’

Germany occupied the northern half of France at first.

Millions of French civilians fled to the South of France by foot, by car, or by bicycle. Some were bombed by German planes. It was complete chaos.

A few managed to get to the UK, where General de Gaulle was constituting a force that could keep fighting Germany.

Yet getting from France to the UK was extremely difficult, and dangerous. Some people boarded commercial ships or small craft, and many were torpedoed or bombed by the Germans. Many drowned.

The Channel crossing was and remains today extremely dangerous.

At first, strangely, more French civilians or soldiers were actually coming back from the UK to France, than the reverse.

The UK seemed to be the next battlefield in the fight against Germany.

It took a few years for the French population in the UK during wartime to reach 30,000 people, and for General de Gaulle’s movement to catch on.

Weil and her family had a Jewish background, so they felt it was safer to flee Paris. Their journey took them to Marseille, then Casablanca (in Morocco), then New York in 1942.

It’s only in the autumn of 1942 that Simone had the opportunity to go from New York to London, where de Gaulle was running what pretty much amounted to a government-in-exile, at the time. 

We can call this government “Free France,” though it had many different names.

De Gaulle had a cabinet, he had a few thousand troops, he administered territories ranging from Francophone Africa to islands such as Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off the coast of Canada. He had a fairly sizeable staff in London.

For English speakers, the best book on the topic is probably the biography of De Gaulle by Julian Jackson, titled De Gaulle: A Certain Idea of France.

Or, if you are interested in the histories of governments-in-exile in general, Martin Conway co-wrote a book called Europe in Exile.

Finally, there’s a really engaging work called Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson, in which she tells some of the crazy, extraordinary stories of exiles from France, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands—and more—on how they arrived to the UK, and what the dynamics of exile were like.

The topic is immense, and I am doing my small share by speaking today about Simone Weil’s part in it.

So Weil finally reached London by ship in December 1942.

It was shortly after a major turning point in the war. In November 1942, the United States had landed troops in North Africa, hoping to eventually cross the Mediterranean. That was called Operation Torch.

And in response, Germany had occupied all of metropolitan France in November 1942. So although the war was from won for the Allies, people felt that bigger forces were now at play and that the United States would play a decisive role.

From London, Weil wanted to participate in resistance missions, asking for example to be parachuted in France to be a nurse, like she had imagined two years before.

Instead, she was recruited to De Gaulle’s Free France to work as a political analyst. A very practical job, that she did not find extremely fulfilling.

She also participated in a committee of politicians and intellectuals who were drafting ideas for a charter on the rights of man.

This committee had been created by a man called René Cassin, a WW1 veteran and law professor.

Cassin ended up drafting the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 with Eleanor Roosevelt.

In her free time in London, Weil went to church, saw a handful of close friends, wrote political essays, and she wrote the monograph that would become The Need for Roots.

She wrote approximately 600 pages in 4 months, sleeping only 3 hours a night.

She led an extremely ascetic lifestyle, that was largely self-imposed.

One of her friends, a Free Frenchman called Francis Closon, recalled spending time with her in London. I quote:

“Simone wore a long brown dress, and a sweater knitted by her mother. She had a frail body, slightly hunched over, weary in her attitude and voice. All her strength was in her gaze which expressed her energy.

Simone came often to the house. She was friendly, affectionate. Things became more difficult at dinner. Our usual dinner, which was modest, seemed maybe excessive to her. Even though she never spoke about it, she refused pretty much all food. She wanted to limit herself to the rations of French children, and even less than that. She never accepted a cube of sugar.

There was in her attitude nothing morbid, nothing offensive, only an impossibility to do otherwise. She was in communion with France, less by voluntary deprivation than by simple, natural abstention.” End of quote.

Because of her ascetic lifestyle, immense workload, and several other factors, she became gravely ill in April of 1943. She had been deeply aggrieved at not being allowed to help more in the war effort.

One morning a friend found her on the floor of her bedroom in Holland Park, near Notting Hill.

Weil said: “It’s all over now. I’m going to be brought to the hospital.”

Her illness, deep unhappiness, and ideological divergences led her to resign from Free France in July 1943, while she was hospitalized.

In hospital, she wouldn’t eat, she had pulmonary issues, and she got weaker and weaker.

Yet when people visited her in hospital she would still ask: “Can I be parachuted in France?”

She died shortly after in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on 24 August 1943. The coroner’s report listed a cardiac deficiency, caused by pulmonary tuberculosis and aggravated by her refusal to eat.

Having passed away at 34, Simone Weil had a short but extraordinary life.

I really recommend the biography of her later years written by Jacques Cabaud, called Simone Weil à New York et à Londres.

Weil’s friend, Simone Pètrement, also wrote a complete biography simply titled Simone Weil: A Life. Both works contain extraordinary anecdotes.

Now let’s turn to her political ideas.

As I said, she wrote a lot of essays during her time in London, but most are still obscure for the greater public, and they still have much to offer.

The complete edition of these essays in French was only published recently in 2019.

In English, there’s been an amazing revival of her thought in the past 4-5 years.

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone wrote A Very Short Introduction to Simone Weil, part of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ Oxford series.

The translation of The Need for Roots has been updated with Penguin Books.

If you go to the website Attention SW, you will find anything and everything on Simone Weil. It is very well done.

Weil’s wartime essays are especially interesting for what she has to say about human “affliction.” Affliction is one of her main worries.

She thought General de Gaulle’s Free France had to do something about “affliction” and needed to reform itself to address affliction.

What does “affliction” mean to her?

Affliction can roughly translate to “malheur,” or deep suffering, and it’s a theme recurring throughout Weil’s career.

For her, affliction is a form of both physical and moral annihilation.

She defines affliction as worse than “simple suffering”: it is a state where humans can lose anything that they possess, including things so intimate that they consider them a part of themselves.

It is “non-being”, a “death of the soul.”

Factory workers, laborers, and the poor would fit this definition of afflicted.

Reading Weil’s essays in context, I found a coherent set of 4 responses to address the “affliction” of the population in occupied France.

These are responses that Free France, led by General de Gaulle, should implement from its base in Great Britain.

Free France would transform from a political-military power into a “spiritual” power, free of partisanship.

Free France would need to express “good” and “embody” justice, speaking to the affliction of the oppressed populations in occupied France.

Finally, Free France could then become the viable alternative to the Vichy Régime.

What I found is that Weil actually has similar views to many members of the Free French leadership.

They showed a side of her thought close to Gaullism and its Catholic circles, even though she eventually resigned from Free France.

However, there was one caveat: she was often more uncompromising and radical in her views than her peers.

Proposal #1: Eliminating the spirit of partisanship.

In her essay called “Human Personality,” Weil begins by saying that afflicted humans are generally “mute.”

They suffer in silence. They are so tired and hurt that they are unable to articulate their suffering.

Part of the role of a state is to ensure that these humans are heard, so that they can be comforted and protected from further harm.

For Weil, one of the main obstacles to humans being heard is political parties, or generally a spirit of partisanship.

Partisans say what they are expected to say. They are part of a collective, they say “we,” rather than “I.”

Because of this, Weil states that political parties inherently prevent freedom of expression.

Furthermore, she wrote, “It is so comfortable to be in a party. Because you do not have to think. There is nothing more comfortable than to not think.”

To her, afflicted humans could only express their affliction in “solitude.” In solitude, man can attain a state of grace.

Instead of putting on a “personality” like in a political party, the solitary man can devote his full attention to his own affliction.

In paying attention to one’s own affliction, one reaches a state of grace, one finds sacrality within oneself. This will help assuage the affliction.

Therefore, Weil concludes, you need to suppress “every part of our institutions and customs which harbors the party spirit in any form whatsoever.”

i.e. You need to abolish political parties. But what would political life look like without political parties? Is that realistic?

Interestingly, Weil and De Gaulle shared a deep contempt for political parties. De Gaulle thought that political parties weaken individual beliefs, and can lead to a spirit of defeatism or group-think.

But whereas for Weil it was non-negotiable, De Gaulle was more pragmatic. He eventually recognized political parties such as the French Communists, because he couldn’t do without them if he wanted to build a coalition to liberate France.

Proposal #2: Expressing “pure good.”

This idea is also found in her essay on ‘Human Personality.’

Once human affliction is heard, leaders need to offer words that speak to human pain, and bring “good.”

“Good” in French is “bien,” which can translate to well-being. But she meant it in a Platonic way.

In the Republic, Plato makes a distinction between what is necessary and what is good. What is good for society is just and is beautiful.

She further specifies that what is good is what relieves pain.

I quote her: “To provide an armor for the afflicted, one must put into their mouths only those words whose rightful abode is in heaven … and express only the good.”

It’s a unique idea because usually you imagine language as an instrument of achieving good policies.

But here, language is the good itself. What does this mean?

Weil means that certain words literally alleviate affliction: those words are “God, truth, justice, love, and good.”

Whereas words that we use in politics: “Democracy, rights, personality”, are just words of “middle values.”

They are words of the temporal realm, not words of the sacred.

Afflicted humans need to hear “good” words to feel better. 

We know this applies to occupied France for several reasons.

During the war, propaganda on the BBC radio played an immense role. Free France would broadcast to occupied France, lifting the morale and inspiring resistance.

Weil explicitly recognizes the importance of propaganda in World War II in her essay “Reflections on the Rebellion.”

In The Need for Roots, she says that one of Free France’s roles is “To help France discover … inspiration … by [broadcasting] words answering the secret thoughts and needs” of the French.

Again, Weil is aligned with De Gaulle, who saw his radio broadcasts as a spiritual task.

But this particular use of vocabulary goes a step further than any average wartime propaganda.

Proposal #3: Free France needs to embody “justice”

This idea is found in “Are We Fighting for Justice?”

We know this essay pertains to Free France because she explicitly talks of an “ongoing global conflict.”.

She begins saying the afflicted are “hungry & thirsty for justice.”

As we recall, “justice” is one of the “good” words.

She defines “justice” as “the sovereignty of sovereignty.”

This means that justice is what gives the state the authority to demand obedience from its citizens.

Justice gives sovereignty to the sovereign power.

If a state is exemplary in its policies, it is “just,” and therefore citizens will consensually obey the law.

The issue is that occupied France, and most Western countries, are unjust societies.

They are unjust because citizens or subjects in these countries are forced to follow the law or to work. They do not consensually obey.

For instance, most social interactions are dominated by money. People’s obedience is “bought and sold”, rather than freely and happily given. She notably mentions workers and colonized people.

For Weil, Free France needs to offer a “just” alternative to the Vichy Régime.

It must embrace exemplary ideas for its future projects.

For instance, it should commit to the restoration of a French Republic.

Moreover, it should promise free labor unions, an independent judiciary, and of course decolonization of French colonies.

Yet there is a paradox. On the one hand, Weil did join Free France and rally De Gaulle’s cause, to fight Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, she still asks “Are We Fighting for Justice?”, which interrogates if they are morally any better than their enemies.

How can you ask that question? It almost implies moral equivalency.

Once again she is more uncompromising than her Free French peers. She thinks if Free France is not fully exemplary, it is unjust.

“It does not suffice to discern which camp is the one of the least injustice … [Because] on the other side, they do exactly the same.”

Eventually, she did quit Free France, because she thought it became too partisan, and thus unjust.

Proposal #4: Free France must become a “spiritual” power.

This idea is found in the essay “A War of Religions.”

It is the final step for addressing affliction in occupied France.

The starting point is that Germany’s conquest of France brought further affliction.

She then says that religion in society is historically inescapable. It is an outlet that will always exist.

In the 20th century, various societies in Europe tried to skirt around religion by replacing it with irreligiosity.

She says that France and most of ‘Europe’ became irreligious.

She then states that Germany felt a horror vacui and reacted to irreligiosity. 

In Germany, irreligiosity was substituted with idolatry. And that gave rise to the collective worship of the Nazi Party. In Japan and Russia as well.

In this sense, World War II is a “War of Religions” because it opposes irreligious and idolatrous countries.

Weil proposes a third path instead: bring back religiosity, by making Free France a “spiritual power.”

Weil proposes to inject “mysticism” into society. “Mysticism” is attained when you unite “the soul with the absolute good.”

Leaders can inject a mystique if they inspire a virtue of “spiritual poverty” in the masses.

The elites, namely De Gaulle, would have to live in moral asceticism and poverty.

To be fair, she practiced this herself: she ate very little, because she wanted to empathize with the famished populations of Europe. She slept on the wooden floor.

If Free France applied this, it would become a sort of “spiritual power,” showing an example and directing consciences in occupied France towards spirituality.

Interestingly, this idea of mysticism is closely intertwined with De Gaulle’s intellectual heritage

The idea of a “mystique” is famously associated with the poet Charles Péguy, who wrote that “everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politic.”

Péguy was a great inspiration for De Gaulle and Catholic officers of Free France. Weil cites him twice in The Need for Roots.

Conclusion:

When you take the three essays I mentioned, and you place them in the context of the war and Weil’s other interventions at the time, you discover that Weil proposed a set of 4 very concrete reforms for Free France:

1)    Putting an end to political parties or partisanship

2)    Using words of pure good in propaganda and communication. Words like “God, truth, justice, love”

3)    Being exemplary, in order to speak in the name of justice

4)    Living an ascetic life.

These reforms were solutions to the “affliction” felt by the population of occupied France. They would transform Free France into a spiritual power.

As I mentioned, many of her ideas were close to De Gaulle’s and the Free French.

What I’m underlining in my research is a new contribution to the scholarship, because it is their differences which are often highlighted.

I show that there is actually much overlap, and it is unfortunate that De Gaulle did not see any productive use for Weil’s ideas or for her strong desire to reform. 

Now, it is possible that Weil adapted her vocabulary in her London just to convince her superiors in Free France, referring to political traditions they were familiar with. That would have to be further investigated.

But unfortunately for her, these proposals were still seen as too idealistic and were never implemented by the Free French.

Remember de Gaulle spoke of Weil’s proposal on nurses as “madness.”

Only decades later did Weil’s peers fully realize the value of her ideas. It is a missed historical encounter.

Simone Weil matters immensely not only for her ideas, her extraordinary life, her sense of sacrifice, but also for the philosophy she inspired.

She inspired major thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Camus. She is often compared to Hannah Arendt.

As I mentioned, she’s currently experiencing some kind of revival in the literature.

And so I encourage you to pick up some of her essays, such as the one on political parties published by the New York Review of Books. Her biographies are also great starting points.

She is one of those thinkers so often quoted that she can be made to say anything. Some of her views on religion are extremely controversial, and a lot of her ideas can be refuted.

That’s why I think it’s best to see for yourself.

I’ll end with a quote from her. It is from a letter she sent to her parents in December 1942, shortly after arriving in the UK, and she speaks about London.

“I love this city more and more, this country and the people who inhabit it. In one way, both the people and things here seem to me to be exactly as I think I expected them to be, and in another way perhaps better.

Lawrence somewhere describes England with the words ‘humor and kindness,’ and one meets these two traits everywhere in the small incidents of daily life. Especially kindness. People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.”

Simone Weil experienced London in its finest hour, where Londoners worked together in the war effort.

It is unfortunate she never got to see the victory in World War 2, a victory we now commemorate, 80 years later.