Tunisia’s 2011 revolution came as a total surprise in a country known for its peaceful political transitions. This image was possible because Tunisia’s history of protest had been forgotten or suppressed. This paper examines the historiography of the revolt of 1864, what had been up to 2011, the largest organized rebellion in Tunisia’s modern history. It focuses on the work of Pierre Grandchamp (1875-1964) a self-taught soldier archivist working in the French colonial residency, who in 1935 published a collection of ‘unedited’ documents forming the episode’s core evidentiary record. In fact, this collection is littered with ellipses, where original text had been systematically cut out and written over. Using the source dispatches from the Quai d’Orsay, the paper reinserts deleted passages to reveal the European role in managing the rebellion and Grandchamp’s interest in suppressing the information more than half a century later, when anticolonial unionized activism was gaining strength. It places the colonial archivist in the circle of scholars who in 1893 founded the Institute of Carthage and published the colonial journal La Revue Tunisienne (1893-1948), sister publication of Algeria’s La Revue Africaine (1856-1962). With its interest in controlling native populations, especially in the Tunisian hinterland, the work produced in La Revue Tunisienne has formed the core of modern Tunisian historiography. The paper examines the implications of these textual omissions and networks of knowledge production for understanding Tunisia’s history of protest.