As a result, Ferdinand Denis did not become part of the collective movement that enshrined an actively liberal view of Portuguese history which emerged with the 1820 revolution and which found in José Liberato, Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano its most well-known proponents; this was a movement that even today still defines a certain notion of nation, progress, decadence, a Golden Age in Portugal's past (15th and 16th centuries) and an optimistic vision of Portugal's future, thanks to the veneration of the sciences, letters and history as a means for national reconciliation and regeneration.

Although older than Herculano and Garrett, Denis ends by not only opening up for them the path to a more general, romantic and literary reading of Portuguese history but also he himself follows the path they had both developed. This is particularly so with the Portuguese edition of his work that refers to a picturesque Portugal, defined as such by its cultural, moral and political traditions and by the richness of its material and intellectual production, which just begged to be made known and respected in the heart of a Europe of free and cultured nations. The same is also true of his way of narrating this same historical and cultural reality in paragraphs and not in chapters. In short, both the figure and the work of this French author had strong repercussions on Portuguese historical culture among the reading public and the intellectual community in Portugal and Brazil. For several decades, he counted Varnhagen, Castilho, D. Pedro II of Brazil and Count Raczynski among his personal friends and correspondents; Ramalho Ortigão and Júlio de Castilho visited him in Paris in 1868 and 1881; Francisco Freire de Carvalho and Teófilo Braga refer to his pivotal role as a scholar and a spreader of Portuguese literature (Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, Algumas cartas copiadas no arquivo de Ferdinand Denis, 1943, passim and Álvaro Manuel Machado, Les romantismes au Portugal., 1986, pp. 383 and 394). After Garrett's death (1854), the Academy of Sciences welcomed Denis as a foreign member on 10th May 1855.

Ferdinand Denis became an administrator of the Sainte-Geneviève Library in 1865 and left his personal stamp on the institution along with a handwritten diary relating to the years 1830 to 1848, in which he refers ironically to “many men of letters of his time” such as Vigny, Chateaubriand, Hugo and Michelet, but also (naturally) to Garrett and the Viscount of Santarém.

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