Simone Weil: In A Lonely Place
The ascetic French philosopher Simone Weil spent the last months of her short life exiled in London working for de Gaulle’s Free French. But, her strange, austere vision for a France reborn after the tragedy of the Second World War was very different from that of the country’s future president.
'But she's mad' was General de Gaulle's comment early in 1943 after scanning a proposal from a brilliant young philosophy professor, Simone Weil. She had just arrived in London via New York to join de Gaulle's Free French organisation after fleeing Occupied France.
Weil's proposal was to send teams of front line nurses into battle alongside Allied troops to aid the wounded where they fell, even though many of the nurs- es were sure to be killed. She thought their very presence would encourage sol- diers to fight harder by reminding them of 'the hearths they were defending', so doing for Allied morale what unswerving loyalty to the Führer - she called it 'idolatry' - did for crack Nazi units.
The proposal had already been turned down by the US government while Weil was in New York. Its rejection by de Gaulle was just another in the string of disappointments she suffered during the last eight months of her life when she was working as a kind of in-house philosopher with the Free French.
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