ABSTRACT
The Spanish royal family had contemplated something similar, planning to take refuge in Mexico after the French army entered Spain, but in the event they abdicated their dynastic rights in favour of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. In Portugal, the pre-revolutionary context was quite different, although also singular. Meanwhile, the country had to endure an ambiguous political situation, theoretically governed from the distant royal court in Rio de Janeiro, through an Anglo-Portuguese Junta de Governo, appointed by the absent king. But the government in Portugal was ideologically divided between two factions, the traditionalist and anti-revolutionary, and Enlightened reformists and protoliberal Masons and afrancesados. The wording of the constitution was a clear symptom of the misunderstanding between two competing political discourses—the one proposing constitutional continuity and another committed to the creation of a brand-new constitutional polity based on the supremacy of the national will.
