French philosopher, political activist, mystic, and factory worker whose writing — most of it published posthumously — is among the 20th century's strangest and most unclassifiable bodies of work. Weil was born into a secular Jewish family in Paris, educated at the École Normale Supérieure (ranked first in the agrégation, with Beauvoir second), taught philosophy in provincial lycées, joined the anarchist militia during the Spanish Civil War, and in 1934–35 took a year of factory labor to understand what industrial work actually does to those it claims.
Her political writing drew the lessons. The Need for Roots (1943, posthumous), written for the Free French in London, is a sustained argument that modern societies have uprooted their members — from land, work, culture, memory — in ways that make genuine obligation and attention impossible. Her reflections on force in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940) — written under the shadow of French collapse — are the single most concentrated thing ever written about what violence does to both its victims and its agents.
From 1938 onward she underwent a series of mystical experiences and moved toward a Christianity of her own making — heterodox, Platonic, refusing baptism (because the church accepted worldly power; because she wished to remain outside with those to whom it was closed). Gravity and Grace (1947, posthumous) collects her aphoristic notebooks on this spiritual work. Her guiding concept, attention — a form of waiting, utterly receptive, free of the ego's interpolations — has become one of the 20th century's important moral-philosophical ideas, taken up by Iris Murdoch and many others.
She starved herself to death in Ashford, Kent, in 1943, refusing to eat more than the rations available to those in occupied France. Albert Camus helped edit her posthumous works and called her the only great spirit of their time.