Revisiting the 1964 Jérémie Vespers

With the return of the month of August, memory demands its rights and compels us to lift the veil on the complicit or imposed silence in Grand’Anse—as Jean-Philippe Belleau understood when he spoke of “the responsibility of the ‘bystanders’ (passive spectators) and the moral collapse of an urban community under the effect of total terror.” This year, 2026, in order to better understand the enormity of the tragedy that struck my family in 1964, I had to go back further than the bullets and machetes. Because