A defender of republican ideals and a personal friend of former minister and political leader Brito Camacho, the turn in political regime made José de Bragança the target of further political persecution for his known opposition to the new authoritarian regime, restricting his civic intervention and, consequently, the extent of his intellectual and cultural work. He not only encountered serious difficulties in publishing his manuscripts, but his participation in academic and cultural bodies was forbidden, fuelling a personal feeling of public ostracism that lasted until the end of his life.

In early 1935, at the age of 42, he published four articles in the Diário de Notícias newspaper under the title “History of History”, which would constitute his first controversy on the historical scene for the ideas he defended. After study and analysis in Spain and France of the Castilian medieval chronicles, he proved that the Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344 (General Chronicle of Spain of 1344) was undoubtedly Portuguese in origin, arguing that it was a partial recompilation of the chronicle of Peter the Constable, thus returning to the beginnings of Portuguese historiography. While the evidence he presented on his historical linguistic thesis merited validation with the international scientific community, as was the case with Spanish scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in Portugal it was only in the late 1940s that the Institute for High Culture decided to order young scholar Lindley Cintra with the review and editing of this valuable historical chronicle, who corroborated it as the work of Count Pedro Afonso. Again in the field of historical philology, he was also among the first historians to challenge the full authorship of Fernão Lopes in the writing of the royal chronicles of the Burgundy Dynasty before Dom Pedro I, as he proceeded to study, review, and critically edit the chronicles of Duarte Galvão, Rui de Pina and Gomes Eanes de Azurara.

José de Bragança’s name as art historian would be associated with the profound historical and artistic research over several years on the so-called “Saint Vincent Panels”, earning a role among the protagonists in the famous “Controversy of the Panels”. Around the 1940s, he claimed that the two triptychs constituted a polyptych of six paintings, and in his view, were the target of an equivocal and deceitful restoration by Luciano Freire, who he accused of misrepresenting some of the figures depicted, illustrating a devotion to the martyrdom of Holy Prince Ferdinand.

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