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This paper suggests the analysis of the dark and the golden legend that Portugal and Brazil created about Napoleon Bonaparte along the troubled period of the French invasions (1807-1810). As sources, it privileges the circumstance prints – newspapers and pamphlets – able to show up, under the shock of the news that the invaders brought and of the unpublished episodes that occurred, the slow detrition of the traditional Portuguese structures and the waving to the entry of the country and the empire in the path of modern politics. To achieve that purpose, the paper also examines the plot of the events, viewing them as the expression of a clash of powers, still active, of the Ancient Regime, and those emergent of the European liberalism.