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 ever since, the subject has been debated.

My reflections led me to wonder where the name Drouin came from, since my grandparents did not have time to tell me its origins. I had to go back in time, to the roots of a lineage of colonists, builders and slaveholders. And I searched.