Le Puy-en-Velay

Le Puy-en-Velay was Simone Weil’s first teaching post, an obscure village where her work as a philosophy teacher quickly became inseparable from public action on behalf of the poor. In the book’s account, the posting placed her at a distance from the large city or port she had wanted, but it did not quiet her political commitments.

Setting and Appointment

Weil wanted a teaching position in a large city or port. Education authorities instead sent her to Le Puy-en-Velay, which the account describes as an obscure village; they considered her views on Marxism, trade unions, pacifism, and poverty too controversial. The posting thus begins her teaching career in a setting chosen, at least in part, to keep her out of the way. The account gives no date for her arrival there.

Teaching and Activism

During school hours, Weil taught philosophy. Outside the classroom, she joined marches with unemployed workers and advocated for the poor. She gave away her surplus food, making material assistance part of her response to poverty. Her mother helped establish her new life by finding and furnishing an apartment, but Weil disliked her parents’ support. She later discarded most of the furniture and lived with very little, a choice that puzzled her affluent parents.

Her activism brought her into conflict with the local educational authority. At a demonstration, detractors called her the Red Virgin of the tribe of Levi. The superintendent for instruction, disturbed by her radical activity, threatened to withdraw her teaching license. Weil said she would regard that outcome as the crown of her career. The superintendent did not carry out the threat, and her activism continued alongside her teaching.

Departure and Place in Her Career

Weil transferred to Auxerre for the next school year, so Le Puy-en-Velay marks the beginning rather than the end of her teaching career. At Auxerre, her students’ poor examination results led the school to abolish the philosophy position. She subsequently taught at Roanne, where she joined a miners’ march protesting wage reductions and unemployment. The sequence places Le Puy-en-Velay at the start of a career in which philosophy teaching and direct engagement with workers and the poor repeatedly met.