Basing his research on a colossal volume of sources, particularly from the Arquivo Histórico Militar [Military Historical Archive] and the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa [Geographical Society of Lisbon], René Pélissier is, in short, the first author in the historiography of the Portuguese empire to produce a detailed and still-relevant history of the hundreds of colonising campaigns undertaken by Portugal from 1848 onwards. Within this framework, he stands out as the author who effectively dismantled the “myth”—an important component of both the old Estado Novo stereotypes and the slogans of African liberation movements—of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation in Africa. Furthermore, by meticulously describing the recurring revolts against Portuguese authority that began in the second half of the 19th century, as well as the subsequent pacification operations carried out by Lisbon—and the often underestimated or outright ignored extreme violence of these operations during the First Republic and in the early 1940s under the Estado Novo ( Pélissier , Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal , 2004: 233–310)— René Pélissier also helped to debunk another significant cliché of 20th-century national historiography: the myth of the Portuguese colonisers’ “tolerant customs.” Similarly, while challenging the rhetoric of the independence movements, he did not shy away from highlighting how the narratives of these movements often involved the incitement of skirmishes, well before the 1960s, accompanied by occasional massacres of civilians.

Finally, the monumental bibliographical work conducted by René Pélissier from the 1980s onward is particularly noteworthy . Following a methodological approach grounded in collecting testimony from all types of printed sources and a firm conviction never to limit his research to works written in the official language of the studied country, the historian published a series of books in which he traced and examined all the studies on the colonisation and decolonisation of Lusophone African countries and Timor (see 1981, 1991, 2006, 2015, and 2017). For example, one of his most recent works, Angola. Guinées . Mozambique. Sahara. Timor, etc. Une bibliographie internationale critique (1990–2005) , offers over 1,700 reviews in a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of all the internationally published studies on the contemporary empires of Portugal and Spain in Africa and Asia. His latest work, Le Sud-Angola dans l’Histoire . Un guide de lectures internationales (2017), catalogues and evaluates around 1,200 international studies, organised by themes and periods, dedicated to southern Angola. Le Sud-Angola highlights the paradoxical status of this predominantly desert region of Angola, ignored for centuries by the Portuguese but, during the 19th century, situated on the “fault line” between colonial powers such as Britain, Germany, and France, and later becoming one of the theatres of the Cold War. This remarkable volume is undoubtedly another significant addition to Pélissier’s monumental body of work on the “third Portuguese empire,” written over five decades by what has been described as an “untiring pioneer of the political-military history of the Portuguese empire in the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries” (Cahen, “Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal,” 2007: 215).

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