French philosopher, mystic, and social critic Simone Weil (1909–1943) was born in Paris on February 3 and died in Ashford, Kent, in England on August 24. Though raised in a prosperous bourgeois family and classically educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Weil sympathized from an early age with the plight of the poor, the oppressed, and the afflicted.

Simone Weil, 1909–1943. The French thinker, political activist, and religious mystic was known for the intensity of her commitments and the breadth and depth of her analysis of numerous aspects of modern civilization. (AP/Wide World Photos.)

Before the age of twenty Weil identified herself as an anarcho-syndicalist. She was attracted to the philosophy of Marx but refused to join the communist party. Her earliest sustained social analysis, "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression," provided a critique of Marxism that Albert Camus (1913–1960) judged the most profound of the...