Simone Weil, a philosopher in the Civil War: the best mirror of the human condition

“Writers don't have to be moral teachers, but they do have to express the human condition.

And nothing is more essential, for all men and at all times, than good and evil.

The phrase belongs to an article by Simone Weil.

She is 32 years old and has already been in Marseille for a few months, transformed into a transit city for thousands of Europeans fleeing Nazism.

The article, published in an intellectual magazine where she collaborated at the time, is compiled in

, edited by Trotta.

The circumstances and the meaning of what Weil writes then are detailed by Carmen Revilla in the prologue of the edition.

Play articles and letters.

For example, letters to the poet Joë Bousquet, who has survived bedridden with him since he was wounded in World War I.

She visits him in Carcassonne.

"Knowing the reality of war is the fullness of knowledge of the real."

She discovers a man who has war embedded in his body, and her friendship draws her into a meditation on the human condition that she wants to embody with her life.

Another correspondent from the Marseille days is Antonio Altarés.

She only knows about him from a comrade from her revolutionary days.

Her friend Nicolas Lazarévitch had spent some time in the Vernet internment camp.

And there she met that Spanish anarchist, Altarés, alone and forgotten.

She doesn't know him and won't know him.

He barely knows anything about that anarchist born in 1909 in Almudévar, who had been in prison during the Republic, who fought during the war, who had three of his brothers shot in the Huesca prison, who will live among refugee camps and Foreign Worker Companies.

In that umpteenth gesture of kindness, which arises from her genuine moral hypochondria (the concept is from the Carrillo / Luque duet), Weil wants to help her.

The first letter is accompanied by a food parcel and a confession.

"I spent some time

in another time, in your beautiful country, even in small towns where foreigners never go.

I think in your region.

I have never forgotten the peasants I saw in their fields and they left an unforgettable impression on me”.

It's true.

She had been a militia member on the Aragon front.

Locomotive of the anarchist train that left Barcelona in July 1936 to liberate Zaragoza from the military coup. Keystone-France (Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

The 45 days that Weil spent in Spain are the narrative axis of the documentary novel

by Adrien Bosc.

He seeks his truth in every detail, in every role, Bosc recreates and moves.

During that summer of 1936 many young Europeans felt the call of the Civil War as a revolutionary epiphany.

They would kill and risk their lives for utopia.

It is your case.

If her demand for militant purity had led the young teacher to work in a factory to find out her working condition, she could not contemplate that war from a distance.

Upon arriving in Barcelona, ​​giving her parents false clues, she imagines herself the protagonist of an impossible mission to free Joaquín Maurín.

Naturally, no one supports her, but she manages to go to the Aragon front and is a militia member of a column of foreign soldiers.

“In Simone's presence, people revealed themselves as they were.

That is why she hated her or admired her ”.

An absurd accident forces her to leave the front and ends up in a hospital in Sitges.

She begins to internalize the war experience, she knew perfectly well what she was talking about when she admitted to Bousquet that full knowledge of reality occurs in war.

That knowledge, when faced with good and evil, will translate into a memorable letter.

It is most likely that he wrote it in 1938. He addressed it to a French monarchist writer who lived in Majorca and who, from the outset, had positioned himself in favor of the insurgents.

An example of a responsible writer.

Upon learning of the barbarism that the Falangists were causing on the island, Georges Bernanos carried out a magnificent exercise in intellectual dignity in the confessional

.

Weil contemplates himself in his words and needs to confess it to Bernanos.

"Apart from you, I don't know of anyone who has bathed in the atmosphere of the Spanish war and has resisted."

Bernanos did it.

She recognized it and another responsible writer, Albert Camus, surrendered with admiration, would recognize it.

In the story, Bosc goes through the adventures of Weil and Bernanos and that of the companions of the column of the French thinker.

A network of scenes that makes sense when reading that letter.

It was discovered in Bernanos' wallet the day he passed away.

He must have taken her there for 10 years because in that mirror he could also, like us, rediscover the human condition.

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