After seeing the excellent film Simone, the woman of the century, it seems inevitable to contrast two contemporary Simones, Veil and Weil. Both French, the first Jewish, the second Christian, one lived long, the other died prematurely, both political activists. In the movies, the woman of the century is Veil.
Marked by her internment in Auschwitz together with her sister and her mother, where only the two young women survived, Simone Veil, married, mother of three children, lawyer, became a magistracy in 1970, at the age of 43. Later, as Minister of Health, she promoted the law to decriminalize abortion, approved in 1975. Veil was president of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, and until her death in 2017, she always acted in favor of the social rights.
Very different was the trajectory of Simone Weil, philosopher, teacher, trade unionist, born in 1909 daughter of Jewish parents. Being very young she converted to Christianity, and at the age of 22 she obtained a position as a philosophy professor. However, her social concerns led her to leave teaching to work as a worker in various factories, including Renault. Her objective was to experience for herself the exploitation to which the workers were subjected and to be able to denounce it with knowledge of the facts.
The outbreak of the Spanish civil war led her to participate in 1938 in the International Brigades in favor of the Republic, first in Barcelona and then in Aragon, until an accident forced her to return to France. She resumed teaching, writing articles while her country was occupied by the Nazis, and refusing to eat more than her most unfortunate compatriots could, thereby aggravating her tuberculosis of she.
In 1942, he left France with his parents, endangered because they were Jews, and settled in the United Kingdom. She there supported herself as an editor for a Free French publication, until her illness worsened and she had to be admitted to an Ashford sanitarium. Her life ended in August 1943, when she was only 34 years old. She had written a lot about the working class, capitalism and against the war, but she did not know how to survive. Unlike Simone Veil, she could not continue to be useful to her kind.