In O poder real em Portugal e as origens do absolutismo [Royal Power in Portugal and the Origins of Absolutism] (1946), the central character is the monarchy between the 12 th and 15 th centuries, considered in its transformations throughout the period, in its institutional features (defence, justice, administration, political action) and in the political ideas that legitimised it. It appears at the centre of conflicts, whose common thread is “a constant tendency towards centralisation through the continuous repression of the privileged classes”. The monarchy thus appears in successive centralising avatars even with the Burgundy dynasty, accentuated with the Aviz dynasty, “of democratic and bourgeois origin”, as emphasised by Portuguese historiography at the time, until it reached absolutism proper with King João II, an admirer and emulator of his contemporary Louis XI. Portugal at the time of the Restoration (1951) already had the cultural focus that had always interested the author. Its central character is the 17 th -century Portuguese man, a choice justified by his being the predecessor of the Brazilian man who would come to be formed in the following centuries. The work has three parts, the Baroque century, the man of the Restoration and the revolution of 1640, which at first glance could evoke Braudel’s tripartite division of his then recently published thesis on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. This association is only formal, because the subject matter of Eduardo França’s book brings it closer to the social psychology of Lucien Febvre, with its characterisation of the “baroque man”, strongly marked by what the author calls the “aristocratism and anti-bourgeois mentality” of 17 th -century Portuguese society. The revolution of 1640 was thus not similar to that of England in 1688, but rather a “happy Fronde,” with a weak bourgeoisie and an exhausted people. The theme of the absence of a strong bourgeoisie in Portugal is not only found in this thesis, but is recurrent in his analyses of Portugal and Brazil, reflecting itself in the guidelines given to his students for over forty years.

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