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Photograph and administrative number from the time when Simone Weil worked in a Renault factory, between 1934-1935.Photo12 / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
In the heat of the patriotic exaltation fueled by the First World War, war godmothers emerged in 1915. The first were French women and they came of any age and condition.
It was about raising the spirits of the soldiers, in addition to promoting the connection between the front and the rear.
The war was fought in all fields.
The godmothers sent letters to these boys and, sometimes, the odd gift.
In that context, a five-year-old girl sponsored one of these young people and decided to abstain from eating chocolate and any other sweets.
She couldn't enjoy those everyday pleasures when far from home there were people risking their lives for her compatriots.
That girl was called Simone Weil.
Even she was not aware of the wave of violence and totalitarianism that was going to sweep the world.
She, too, did not foresee that her future would lead her to become one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, despite her premature death in the summer of 1943 as a result of tuberculosis.
Weil contained within herself many of the contradictions of her time and, as paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, all of them allowed her to give coherence to her biography.
She was a revolutionary who disbelieved in the dominant communist dream and a Jew who never identified herself as such.
In fact, she ended up accepting Christianity, although always from the margins and without belonging to any church.
She was a mystic who could not take her feet off the ground and a contemplative mind that never stopped participating in the debates and mobilizations of her time.
Her childhood nationalist concerns forgotten, Weil became a staunch pacifist, which did not prevent her from traveling in August 1936 to a Spain at war to join the Durruti Column.
She was in the country for just two months.
She did not have to take up a weapon because a few days later, when she stepped on a frying pan hidden in the undergrowth, she burned one of her feet.
At the end of September, she had to return to France to get proper care.
Página Indómita has just published a compilation of the texts he wrote from his war experience in Spain.
In this compilation there are some brief entries from his diary, articles in the press and a letter to Georges Bernanos.
At first glance it can be taken as a minor book, but its reflections hit until they leave the reader breathless.
Weil is not fooled by war songs or grandiloquent words.
He understands that every war is a disaster of humanity and he is not afraid to denounce the outrages of his own.
He feels morally complicit in the bloodshed because he considers it a betrayal of the ideals they claim to share.
For that reason, the letter to Georges Bernanos is so significant.
The author of
The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon
and Weil were ideologically distant, however, both hold hands and refuse to be trapped by a violent atmosphere that seeks to draw reality in black or white.
His ideas were rooted in deep life experience.
He did not know how, nor did he want to, think about humanity without putting the helpless at the center.
Weil is difficult to pigeonhole, he baffles everyone equally because he never stops challenging the commonplaces.
She can be considered a radical thinker because her reflections were rooted in a deep life experience.
She did not know how, nor did she want to, think about the human without putting the helpless at the center.
She snuck into the folds of reality to discover that our fragile nature is a window of opportunity for humanity.
The pages collected in
The Spanish War
demonstrate this even in the smallest anecdotes.
Look for it in your bookstore
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