The text of his degree (licenciatura) thesis had already employed arguments taken from the history of Portuguese Law. Similarly, the framework Rocha gave to Instituições de Direito Civil Português (1842, eight editions by 1917) also contains a historical dimension – or rather, a dimension of temporality. The singularity of Ensaio… lies in what is in fact its historiographical dimension, inasmuch as Rocha did not limit himself to attributing a tradition or a reason based on antiquity to the Law of the Portuguese Nation. The text contains an articulated narration of the past and introduces an idea of history that has major methodological implications. Albeit conceived within the university tradition, the narrative is formally innovative in a way that the author acknowledges to be marked by liberalism and the latest scientific formats. In António Rocha’s writings the pedagogical intent is directly intertwined with a liberal ideal of an involved reader, student and citizen; one that no longer allowed people to “occupy themselves like that with learning the lives of kings, when they ought to be studying the history of the nation”, thereby continuing to restrict the “nexus of events”, while the reader’s attention and interest were simultaneously dispersed and unsatisfied (Ensaio… 1896, p.XXI). With these arguments, Ensaio turned Melo Freire’s narrative failings into something exuberant from the point of view of a historical science, attributing them to censorship and his adherence to an idealised idea of despotic sovereignty.

At the time, the originality of Ensaio… – now considered a paradigmatic change in the historiographical field – was pointed to by Alexandre Herculano, who in no uncertain terms called it a scientific revolution. It was finally “time for history to be something more than just a date and an autem genuit of noble genealogy in the biblical style” (“Revista Bibliográfica…”, Revista Universal Lisbonense, 1941, p.59). The fact is that in his ideas, Rocha, who ever since then has been known as the “Portuguese Guizot”, included a series of concerns regarding documentary critique and historiographical reflection that put him a step ahead of his contemporaries, permitting a sophistication of the idea of the truth and, in short, of History as a science, which was later developed by authors like Herculano himself. In the same way, he inaugurated a new type of narrative that matched the liberal way of looking at sociopolitical relations, of which Herculano was also an extravagant producer. In this history of the Law, which goes back to Lusitanian times, there is a persistent image of the body of a nation that resists all forms of government and territorial designs. The topics and questions raised – the diversity of the peoples that make up the country, aspects related to popular decision-making and the will of the people, the splendour of medievality, the list of the mistakes made in the colonial policy, and the criticism of the actions of both the Jesuits and the Marquis of Pombal, for example – display a new way of writing about the past of the Portuguese people.

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