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The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil
- Abstract
I First read The Need for Roots in Paris when Gallimard issued it in 1949, and at once told my Parisian friends that I thought it the deepest work to come out of France during the whole war period. They were as surprised by my enthusiasm as I was perplexed by their coldness; in Paris, you expect your friends to agree with you, and when they do not you know something real is at stake. Now most of the persons to whom I spoke about Simone Weil had known her, having contributed during the 30′s, along with her, to La Condition Ouvrière, a left-wing review edited by Georges Bataille and Boris Souvarine. These people would not praise her or hear her praised. They did not want to admire her; moreover, they were convinced they did not have to. I do not think they were much influenced by the fact that the Catholics were then bruiting her name. (The same persons admired Claudel. It would be so much nicer to despise him, but seeing that one couldn’t, wasn’t he admirable?) But nothing could make them accept as inevitable the mounting interest in Simone Weil. One, a historian, did not scruple to attack his own views when they happened to coincide with hers. “Where considerable goodness is present,” he told me, “I can never believe there is much intellect.”
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