A philosophy teacher, she took a factory job to understand what industrial labor does to the human mind.
Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 into a secular Jewish family. She was a brilliant student who graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and became a philosophy teacher. She was also, by temperament, unable to theorize about suffering without experiencing it firsthand.1
In December 1934, at the age of twenty-five, Weil took a leave of absence from teaching and went to work as an unskilled laborer in a Paris metalworking factory. She spent the next year working in three different factories, operating a press, packing metal components, and running a milling machine.2
Her journal entries from the factory floor documented what she called the experience of affliction, a state in which the combination of physical exhaustion, monotony, and fear of the foreman crushed the worker’s capacity to think. She observed that the most destructive element was not the difficulty of the work but the speed imposed by the machines and the constant subordination of the worker’s judgment to the demands of production.3
Weil concluded that industrial labor, as it was organized, did not merely tire the body. It colonized the mind, leaving the worker unable to sustain the kind of attention that gives life meaning.
She left the factory in August 1935, physically broken and intellectually transformed. Her factory journal was later published as La condition ouvrière (The Worker’s Condition). She wrote that she had entered the factory as a philosopher and emerged understanding that most people who perform repetitive work are not thinking about anything at all, because the system has made thought impossible.4
Weil died on August 24, 1943, in a sanatorium in Ashford, England, at the age of thirty-four. The coroner’s verdict noted that she had refused to eat adequately while her compatriots in France were going hungry.5 Most of her work was published posthumously. Albert Camus, who edited several of her volumes, called her the only great spirit of their time. Her factory writings remain among the most precise firsthand accounts of what industrial work does to the inner life of the person performing it.