Biography

The web page of Ethel Groffier

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Biography

“We are from our childhood as we are from one country,” says the expression attributed to French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I grew up in Belgium. My father, Jean Groffier, was the editor in chief of a literary journal he had created with artists and writers friends. The journal was abundantly illustrated and courted by Marinetti, anxious to rekindle an ailing futurism. Our house was full of Belgian and foreign novelists, poets and painters. They were young, enthusiastic, idealistic, anti-bourgeois and had promised to “remain pure” in the journal’s manifesto. I remember an Italian poet, Lionello Fiumi, today unjustly forgotten, who gave me my first doll. Literary journals are fragile creatures. My father’s lasted seven years before disappearing in the sweeping upheavals of the time. But the magic of words and colours stayed with me as elusive and constant ideals. In spite of my passion for history, I read law at the Free University of Brussels because I found the prospect of teaching in a provincial lycée disheartening. Marriages of convenience are sometimes very happy. It was my case with the law.

A first job with the International Organization of Employers in Geneva lead to an offer of employment in the Labour Department in Ottawa, where I was to study the possibility of ratifying some international labour conventions. I left this interesting work to pursue doctoral studies at McGill University in Montreal, during which I also worked at the Civil Code Revision Office of Quebec. Afterwards, I started teaching at the Faculty of law of the University, specializing in Conflict of Laws and legal terminology. I was also, for a few years, a member of the Order of Translators of Quebec. Translation is a wonderful occupation, provided one has the time to savour words in both languages. If one has to labour under the constant threat of deadlines and sanctions in case the quota is not met, it is slavery.

Early retirement and appointment as Emeritus researcher at the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law gave me the luxury of time. I went back to history, particularly of the Enlightenment. During that period, “aude sapere” became the motto of the European intelligentsia, and the French and English languages combined beauty and simplicity. It is also a time that was and still is the object of endless controversies between those who see it as the origin of our fundamental freedoms and those who are convinced that it is the source of all the “isms” that plague the present: racism, fascism, anti-feminism… I believe that the historian’s role is not that of a judge and that viewing people and events of the past in the light of our present values is both futile and misleading.

The eighteenth century lead me to the study of encyclopaedism and the works of Voltaire, the love of rare books and the promotion of the rich special collections of McGill University’s Library. At the same time, certain social problems have increasingly interested me, among them inequalities and attacks on freedom of expression. I also look after the Nachlass of my late husband, the philosopher Raymond Klibansky (1905-2005), www.raymondklibansky.org, and after my modest collections of books and paintings.