When Simone Weil wrote The Need for Roots in 1943, France had been under Nazi control for nearly three years. The book is in part an attempt to explain why this happened, and in part a proposal to prevent something similar from ever happening again.
The problem, as she saw it, was that France had no authentic sense of country, of what it means to belong to a nation. The people of a country who don’t love it can’t be expected to fight and die for it.
It wasn’t that the French had no love at all for France. But for Weil, that love wasn’t deep or real enough. She contrasts this with the British, whose patriotism and spirit she admired. (She wrote the book in England, the base of the French Resistance.)
The French had once had this love, but over time, they had lost it. Weil examines how this took place over the centuries, finding particular fault with and tracing the problem directly to the French Revolution.
That Revolution, she claims, took rights as its foundation, when it should have gone much deeper, to the place where those rights come from.
They come, in Weil’s view, from our obligations to each other — to treat each other as human beings for no other reason than that we’re human beings.
It was only a matter of time, then, before France’s shaky foundation collapsed. Now that it had, and assuming the Germans would be eventually defeated, Weil saw an opportunity to rebuild the country from the ground up with a much stronger base.
In writing about it, she provides razor-sharp analysis and recommendations that are both inspiring and insufferable.
For one thing, she argues for the revamping of education. France’s educational system as it stood, which had its own roots in the Renaissance, had created a split between classes, a false sense of culture, and a warped notion of what learning should look like. In that system, she writes, “the desire to learn for the sake of learning, the desire for truth, has become very rare” (35).
Weil observes a similar disconnection in the workforce. Having worked in the factories, she saw this firsthand. Labor, which for her is sacred, had been completely uprooted from its real purpose: to bring value to the life of the laborer. Instead of working for themselves, workers did their jobs in awful conditions in which they had been placed by their managers. They were used as tools by a class who saw them as expendable.
But Weil is not proposing communism:
For workers, the jumble of confused and more or less false ideas known as Marxism, a jumble which, since Marx’s day, has only appealed to mediocre bourgeois intellectuals, is also completely alien, indigestible, and in itself devoid of sustenance for the workers because it has been gutted of almost all the truth contained in Marx’s writings. (35)
As with all powerful ideas, Marxism had been diluted and used as a tool by those in power.
The same goes for religion, especially Christianity, which the Romans had appropriated and turned upside-down. (Weil had no love whatsoever for the Romans, whose paganistic echoes she saw in Hitler’s regime.) Christianity needed to be reclaimed and returned to its earlier, purer form. In the process, it should be reconciled with science, whose practitioners were seen as a new kind of priesthood.
For me, this is where Weil’s thinking veers off-course. For centuries, philosophers had been attempting such a reconciliation and had failed every time. Her own efforts don’t fare much better and are often obscured by her tendencies toward mysticism and her stubborn insistence on Christianity as the only vehicle through which truth can be expressed.
She does this because she believes with all her heart that only an authentic Christianity can serve as a basis for a healthy society. But her arguments in this vein are mostly weak, as when she says, without providing evidence, that “[i]t is certain that Christ possessed certain special powers; how could we doubt it, since we can verify that Hindu and Tibetan holy men possess such powers?” (206). It’s almost shocking to see writing like this from someone who’d graduated from the École Normale.
She also uses words like “good” and “evil” as if they refer to things that remain objective throughout eternity. The “good” relates to God and his will; “evil” occurs in the distance between our actions and that will.
To be fair, I have my own notions of both, but I can’t expect the whole world, much less my fellow Americans, to get on board with them.
And yet The Need for Roots is still worth reading. Many of the world’s problems today can be explained at least partially in terms of deracination. Take America’s current democratic crisis. Millions of American voters believe the country they love — or claim to love — has been stolen from them. How they all got to that point may depend, but a sense of losing something — whether “status” or jobs or the right to use certain slurs with impunity — drove them to it. But regardless of our political persuasion, should we even have one, most of us agree that the institutions as they stand are failures in need of replacement.
Charles de Gaulle read parts of Weil’s book and then said that its author was “crazy” (x). But Weil was bright and bold enough to venture ideas that might help rejuvenate the country she loved. It would’ve truly been insane for her to look around and think that things were fine the way they were and always would be.
