No doubt should remain, however, that Gilberto Freyre thought, spoke and wrote as a historian. And, taken as a pair, the texts quoted here can be read as a true manifesto for a new history of Brazil - a history free, as far as possible, of preconceived ideas and at the same time permeated with sociology, anthropology, psychology and any other science that would enable a better understanding of its processes. A history supported by the most diverse sources, which would allow not only an overall, multifaceted reconstitution of the past but also an understanding of its dynamic. A history marked by the historian’s commitment to his subject, produced by interweaving scientific objectivity with analytical subjectivity. A history that, without limiting itself only to itself, might orient modern interpretations of Brazilian society so that the limits of habitual, or “traditional”, approaches might be pushed forward. A history in fact that might revolutionize knowledge of Brazil and might be converted, at the very limit, into its new paradigm.

One can also say that, supported by the knowledge he had acquired in his studies and research outside Brazil and, above all, by the originality of his reflections about dimensions which until then had been hardly, or not at all, considered by world historiography, Freyre undertook his own battle for history, being “a genuine pioneer”, as the English historian Asa Briggs noted some time ago (and as Peter Burke did more recently), “in the elaboration of what Lucien Febvre called in 1949 ‘a new type of history’” (“Gilberto Freyre e o estudo da história social” [Gilberto Freyre and the study of social history], 1981, p. 35). It was not by chance that it was the same Febvre who was asked to write the preface to the French translation of Casa-grande & senzala, published by Gallimard in 1952 with the title Maîtres et Esclaves. This demonstrates perfectly how the work of this man from Pernambuco was in tune with that of the French historians of the Annales school in the 1930s, even though at the time he and they were following their own paths, by themselves and in their own ways. There is no problem with this. On the contrary, the parallel trajectories serve to remind us, as Briggs also says, that “a new type of history” always results from the “work of many hands in many places” (idem, ibidem), thus crushing any eventual value judgements and anachronistic ranking of works and authors.

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