Silencing the Past: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Cry Finally in French!

Finally, good news! Thanks to Lyonel Trouillot and Pierre Buteau for the prefaces and afterwords! A book that shook the Anglophone world like an earthquake is now translated into French: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past is published under the title Faire taire le passé. Available in bookstores today in Quebec, and from October 3rd in Europe, this publication is not merely an editorial event. It is a call. A summons. The Place of Silences Trouillot, Michel-Rolph of course, had warned us: « Silencing the past is a process we have long been engaged in. » His work explores what unfolds in the interstices of silence, where history is made in the shadows. Some facts are inflated like sails in the wind. Columbus, a textbook hero, while others are buried in muteness: colonial violence, indigenous suffering, the trampled dignity of peoples. And then there is the great silence, the one that still haunts the world: the Haitian Revolution, a victorious insurrection of slaves, the first dawn of a Black Republic. A heavy silence, a guilty silence, an obstinate silence of a history that refused to acknowledge the unthinkable: that slaves broke their chains and shattered the world order. A Book for Our Governance and Our Memories This translation delivers not only new words but a mirror.
It compels us to examine how powers manufacture oblivion, how invisibility becomes history's supreme weapon. To govern, to remember, to write, to transmit: everything is connected. And in this mirror, we see our own elites summoned to responsibility: how to govern without memory? How to claim to build the future if we do not confront the ghosts of the past? Trouillot Among the Constellations With Faire taire le passé, Michel-Rolph Trouillot remains alongside Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, in the luminous circle of those who reinvent narratives, refuse imposed silences, and give voice to the erased. This book is more than a text: it is a seismograph of consciences, a gentle weapon, a key offered to reopen history and let in the light. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Faire taire le passé is available today in Quebec, and on October 3rd in Europe. And what if, instead of John Brown Avenue, we had a Michel-Rolph Trouillot Avenue?
And what if a road connecting Cap-Haïtien Airport to the Citadel bore his name? Yves Lafortune
Miami, September 24, 2025