In his youth, between the 1940s and 1950s, JAF was involved in several controversies that serve to better understand his principles and the practice that stemmed thereof . First, there was the internal split of the Surrealist Group between his own group (with António Pedro, Fernando Azevedo, and Vespeira) and another led by Mário Cesariny; the latter, until the end of his life, considered França a false surrealist who had imposed a subjective historicization on a movement whose essence lay in the freedom of artistic experiences and practices. At the same time,JAF confronted Neo-Realism, especially the radical positions of the then-young painter Júlio Pomar against abstract art, which was considered a deviation from the cultural responsibility to affirm and represent the working class. Later, in particular following the exhibition Os anos quarenta na arte portuguesa [The 1940s in Portuguese Art] at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1982, he was challenged by Fernando Guedes, who unequivocally demonstrated that JAF had underestimated the fact that abstract art had already begun in the 1940s in Porto (within the Independent Exhibitions and the pictorial work of Fernando Lanhas), and not in Lisbon, as the historian had always maintained, defending the predominance of his artist friends who, in the early 1950s, transitioned from Surrealism to Abstraction.

From the 1980s onwards, and especially at the turn of the 20th century into the 21st, other aspects of França's work began to be revisited or contested. Regarding his inaugural work, Lisboa pombalina e o Iluminismo [Pombaline Lisbon and the Enlightenment],new historians of architecture and urbanism (for example, Walter Rossa, a disciple of José Eduardo Horta Correia), while not questioning the foundational qualities of the research, proved that the Pombaline plans for the city's reconstruction were not a break with the past but rather a continuation and transformation of architectural and urban practices that dated back to the 16th century and had been affirmed in the construction of cities within the Portuguese empire. As for the treatment of 19th- and 20th-century art, several lines of direction that JAF shared with his mentors and peers have been increasingly challenged: the superiority of European artistic culture, generated since the Renaissance by a succession of avant-garde movements centred in Rome and later, definitively, in Paris; the prevalence of the 'Fine Arts' (i.e., Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture) over the Decorative Arts, whose craftsmanship and decorative values were predominantly conservative; the dependence of the arts in peripheral countries on the major centres, which in the case of Portugal led to the underestimation of other dynamics of cultural exchange and the devaluation of artists (almost all of them, in fact) who did not achieve international recognition; the lack of attention to significant aspects of Porto's cultural autonomy in relation to Lisbon; an excessively pessimistic view of the accomplishments of art in Portugal, maintaining the catastrophic attitude of the Generation of the 1870s, which he greatly admired. However, the sometimes scathing criticism directed at JAF's work does not diminish the exceptional nature of his career and his body of work, which were foundational for the history of 20th-century art in Portugal.

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