Simone Weil and George Orwell never met and it seems unlikely that they ever heard of one another. Nonetheless, the fact that 2003 is the 100th anniversary of Orwell’s birth and the 60th of Weil’s death allows us to note other far more significant similarities between the great English and French writers. It is not certain that they would have admired each other, but each would have recognised in the other the seriousness of purpose and prophetic qualities that they wore like stigmata.
Weil’s anniversary, unlike Orwell’s, has passed relatively unremarked in this country. While she left several works which are now regarded as political and spiritual classics, unlike Orwell she left no powerful motifs or aphorisms which have become part of the language of the West. She remains an essential writer of the 20th century, however, because of, as Susan Sontag put it, her ‘scathing
originality’. The continuing influence of Weil and Orwell upon our culture flows not only from what Albert Camus described, in Weil’s case, as a ‘madness for truth’ but also from their manner of pursuing it. It was this combination which made them ‘scathingly original’.
Orwell’s history is well known but what of Simone Weil’s? A potted summary might go as follows: she was a brilliant young French woman, born in Paris in 1909 in a fully assimilated, secular Jewish family. Her teachers recognised early in her a gift for philosophical thought. Like so many millions in her day, she was politically of the left and identified strongly with the unemployed and working people. In 1934, she took leave from her teaching position to work in an electrical works. The following year she worked in a forging works and a car factory and in 1936 she joined an anarchist trade union group engaged in Spain against Franco, but was injured by boiling oil and had to return to France without fighting. After the defeat of France in 1940, she escaped and worked for the Free French in London. She died aged 34, in London in 1943.
Her political experiences, especially her manual work, marked her irrevocably. She took a year’s leave from teaching to ‘make a bit of contact with the famous “real life”’. Writing to her Dominican friend Fr Perrin in 1942, she described the effects on her of labouring:
After my year in the factory … I was, as it were, broken in pieces, body and soul.