born Feb. 3, 1909, Paris, France
died Aug. 24, 1943, Ashford, Kent, Eng.
French mystic and social philosopher.
After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, she taught philosophy in several girls' schools from 1931 to 1938. To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in an auto factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. She assisted the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War and aided the French Resistance from London from 1942. Born Jewish, she converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1940s. She died at age 34 of tuberculosis complicated by self-imposed starvation undertaken out of sympathy for those suffering in occupied France. Her posthumously published works, including Gravity and Grace (1947), The Need for Roots (1949), Waiting for God (1950), and Notebooks (3 vol., 1951–56) explore her own religious life and analyze the individual's relation to the state and to God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.