In the 1930's Simone Weil (pronounced "Vey") was a professor of philosophy in French high schools, beloved by her students, but always under attack from the authorities for organizing the unemployed and the exploited workers. Despite her poor health (chronic migrane headaches), and extreme lack of manual dexterity, she took a year off to work for the scraps workers were then paid on the assembly line at Renault Works.
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She fought with the anarchists against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War (until she was injured in a kitchen accident-she was pretty clumsy), later she worked as a farm worker, and was a member of the French Resistance in World War II.
When she died at age 34 in 1943, she was known except to a few close friends, only as a scholar, a tireless political activist and theorist- a revolutionary who in attacked the oppression
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in communism as well as the exploitation in capitalism.
In the last years of her life she experienced what she accepted as the living presence of the risen Christ everyday. However, she never ceased to proclaim not only the wisdom of other religions, but a belief that it was possible to reach God through them. She never joined a church. It was an atheist, Albert Camus, who arranged the first publication of some of her early work. (Click)