German occupation of Paris

The German occupation of Paris is a turning point in the account of Simone Weil: it displaces her family, sharpens the conflict between relative safety abroad and the suffering of France, and precedes her move to work for the Free French government in exile. The book traces this rupture through personal displacement, legal exclusion, religious practice, and political writing, while also noting the wider pressures World War II placed on other religious and social movements.

Before and Under Occupation

Before the occupation, Weil had taken leave from teaching to work in a factory in 1934–35. Her journal recorded the strain of production quotas, breakdown-prone machinery, fatigue, and the humiliation of repeatedly failing to make the rate. This earlier effort to experience workers’ conditions provides a measure of her sustained engagement with hardship, although the account does not present it as a direct consequence of the occupation.

After the German occupation of Paris, the Weil family moved to Marseille. In 1940, Vichy anti-Jewish laws officially dismissed Simone from the state teaching service. She met Father J. M. Perrin and formed a close friendship with him; he became her spiritual director. Perrin later introduced her to Gustave Thibon, who ran a Catholic agricultural colony in southern France. Thibon initially doubted that an intellectual could undertake prolonged manual labor, but accepted her after Perrin’s insistence and in light of his sympathy for persecuted Jews. The move thus brought both a changed living situation and new relationships around Weil’s spiritual and practical life.

Exile and the Problem of Return

On May 17, 1942, Weil and her family sailed for the United States and took an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. She was unhappy there: the security of American life felt intolerable while people in France endured Nazi rule and war. Yet the account also records a daily religious practice during this period: she attended Mass at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street, the church where Thomas Merton had been baptized.

Weil wanted to be parachuted back into France, but learned that this plan was unrealistic, making a return impossible. Rather than remain with her family, she left on November 9, 1942, and sailed for England to work for the Free French government in exile. The sequence makes her departure a response to enforced distance from France, not a resolution of that distance: she could not return in the way she had hoped, but sought political work from abroad.

Writing for a Postwar France

In England, Weil wrote The Need for Roots, an account of what she believed would be necessary for France’s development after the war. Its three parts move from the needs of the soul—including order, liberty, responsibility, equality, freedom of opinion, security, private property, and truth—to the damage of uprootedness and then to the growth of roots. The book’s concern with war’s losses therefore leads into a constructive question: what human and social needs would have to be recognized in rebuilding France?

The Need for Roots was not published until 1949, six years after Weil’s death. Its delayed publication separates the moment of wartime composition from the later moment when readers could encounter her postwar proposals. In the account of the occupation, exile is consequently both a biographical rupture and the setting in which she formulated a response directed toward France’s future.

Wider Wartime Pressures

The book also records a distinct American consequence of World War II through Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. The paper had addressed unemployment, labor, racial exploitation, child labor, and other social issues; as war approached, it also covered war and peace. Its circulation, which had reached 190,000 in 1938, fell during World War II because of Day’s pacifism. This episode is not presented as a result of the German occupation of Paris, but it shows how wartime pressures reached religious and social work well beyond occupied France, affecting both the public reach of a publication and the commitments associated with it.